#32 The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo, Natalie Naudus (Narrator)

 

This is a retelling of The Great Gasby with Jordan as the main POV and magic in the mix.  Jordan was adopted from Vietnam by missionaries and has almost no memories of her life there.  There is some casual magic use by people but it doesn’t seem to dominate the day to day lives of people. The story is fairly faithful to the The Great Gasby with the focus on Jordan and you get quite a bit of backstory on her and what she will do after the end of the book. I listened to the audio version and the narration was great. 

#33 Tokyo Ever After by Emiko Jean, Ali Ahn (Narrator)

 

This is a cute YA of a Japanese American girl finding out that her unknown to her father is the crown prince of Japan. When her best friend sees an inscription in a book of Izumi’s mom leads to some internet sleuthing to figure out just who the mystery dad is. Izumi’s mom had lied about her relationship to her daughter and had never told the prince that she was pregnant after he left Harvard.    She does give her daughter the contact info of one of the prince’s friends from collage and she sends an email. Of course the story leaks and the Japanese press is on her doorstep and she soon finds herself off to Japan. The one part that bothered me in all of this is that Izumi never bothered to read or study the binder of info sent to her to prep her for the trip.  For a kid that was curious it seems she wanted to go into all of this blind. It does help the story along as she is blundering around in the rarified world.   There is a happy ending to all of this and it was an enjoyable book to listen to.