Rachel L's Reviews > The Chosen and the Beautiful

2.5 stars

I blame myself for the low rating because I went into this book blind after seeing it on a fantasy list and didn’t realize it was a retelling of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of Jordan. Had I known that, I probably never would have picked this book up.

Nghi Vo is a very talented writer, I’ll give her that. Her writing has a very strong voice and she did an excellent job with the tone of the novel. Where this book fell flat was the worldbuilding. It’s The Great Gatsby but with magic and demons right? Except Vo spent no time developing this and it felt very random, forced, and just thrown in every once in a while. It was distracting more than anything and didn’t fit at all with the rest of the book. That and while Jordan was the main and most interesting character, this book was about everyone except her.

If you love The Great Gatsby and don’t mind random fantasy thrown in for the heck of it, this book is for you. But it really just didn’t work for my reading tastes.