The Quill #7: Recommended Reads #3

Nghi Vo is an award-winning Midwestern author. She writes short, compelling novels full of complex characters and vivid, detailed worlds that always leave me wanting more. She has written three full-length novels, six novellas, and several short stories.I first discovered her through one of her series of Singing Hills novellas, An Empress of Salt and Fortune, which is part of her Singing Hills Cycle, a series of novellas that follow Cleric Chih on their travels collecting stories for their abbey. What really made me fall in love with Vo’s writing, however, was her novel The Chosen and the Beautiful. It’s a retelling of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of Jordan Baker. In Vo’s book, Jordan is a queer Asian-American woman who was adopted and raised by a wealthy White woman and is stuck in a society that is suffocating her. Because no one expects her to fulfill the same role as her White peers, Jordan is able to observe the society around her. In many ways, she never quite fits in and is somewhat distant from her surroundings. She still cares deeply about the people around her, especially her best friend Daisy, even when they are being idiots.

Vo creates worlds by carving a small window for us to view them through the eyes of her main characters. She doesn’t explain. She shows her readers details and characters, and expects us to be able to keep up. Her writing is lyrical in how the words she chooses flow into each other, but it’s also quite compact. She says what she sets out to in half the words many other authors would, without leaving anything out. But in the end, what really hooked me was the wry humor invoked by her characters refusing to do or believe in the expected. Jordan Baker makes tigers out of paper; Cleric Chih tells stories to tigers and then goes for a haircut and a sweet treat. Vo’s characters may listen to others attentively, but they rarely act to please someone else.