Vo’s skills in her debut novel do not stop at her precise understanding and reinvention of these overly familiar characters. This Gatsby embodies a charisma and magnetism so strong that you can’t help but wish you too could enter the halls of his mansion for a party or two, like the rest of New York’s old and new money. Any encounter with Gatsby void of Daisy felt like entering a battle you knew you could not - and perhaps did not want to - win. Similarly, Vo’s reimagined Gatsby made me alert in anticipation each time he appeared on the page. The Daisy I imagined now matches the Daisy on the page: complicated, consuming and even monstrous at times.

Vo affirms all my greatest fears and desires. When I first encountered Daisy in high school, I felt there was something dangerous lurking right under her surface, something unexplored through Fitzgerald’s telling.

Outside of sweeping pro-golf tournaments, Jordan experiments with paper-cutting magic, grapples with people’s impositions on her identity as an adopted Vietnamese orphan and kisses enough people in New York City’s most exclusive clubs to keep high society talking.ĭaisy and Gatsby also become case studies of Vo’s unique ability to detect the cracks in each character from her source material and consequently elicit their hidden desires and thoughts that bloom mesmerizingly on the page. Vo’s Jordan is a multifaceted character who refuses to be easily, singularly or absolutely understood, lending herself as an interesting lens through which we can relive and reexamine a classic story. In Fitzgerald’s original, she sits mostly on the sidelines but is welcomed onto the main stage enough times to plant seeds of intrigue that Vo adopts and nurtures into her own captivating and magic-wielding version of her. Jordan Baker is a smart choice for the heroine of Vo’s novel. Vo, of course, takes things a step further - her novel convinces me that there were relationships not explored in the original that I perhaps should have cared more about, especially those that include Jordan Baker. These aspects of a new world remain a backdrop to the relationships that I once cared deeply about in “The Great Gatsby,” such as Nick and Gatsby’s relationship and most certainly Daisy and Gatsby’s as well. Vo’s 1920s New York is one where cocktails can be made from demon’s blood and individuals can sell their souls for treasure worth the greatest price. A scintillating reimagining of “The Great Gatsby” with sharp, discerning Vietnamese American Jordan Baker as the female lead, Nghi Vo’s debut novel “The Chosen and the Beautiful” invites modern readers into a version of Fitzgerald’s New York that is at once comfortably familiar and dangerously alluring.

The chosen and the beautiful