It’s true that my interest in rich whites dicking each other around is limited, but what can I say? Fitzgerald is a good writer! So that’s my background vis-a-vis The Great Gatsby, of which The Chosen and the Beautiful is a queer, immigrant, fantasy retelling. (I liked some of Ezra Pound’s poetry, but it turns out that he is, unfortunately, a fascist.) More recently when I was doing my project of rereading books I owned by white men to see if they still worked for me (three did not two did, ish), I still liked The Great Gatsby. I liked it when I read it in high school, despite having little to no interest in any of the other writers from this era that we had to read in school. As I launch into what isn’t so much a review as it is a praise hymn, I feel that I should first specify that I quite like The Great Gatsby. Now there is The Chosen and the Beautiful. BRACE YOURSELF and know in advance that I am not even slightly sorry.) (My use here of apotheosis will be but the first of many hyperbolic shrieks throughout this review, because I’m about as bullish on Nghi Vo’s writing as I have been about any author in I don’t know how long.

When Nghi Vo released her first novella, Empress of Salt and Fortune, I was blown away by her talent at the task category “putting a book together.” I know that’s a very unsexy way to describe a novella, but it applies! Empress packed so much plot, emotional insight, and character development into its 128 pages that it felt like an apotheosis of the novella form.

The chosen and the beautiful nghi vo