Siren Queen by Nghi Vo
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Authors

Siren Queen

by

Nghi Vo

(Author)

4.2

-

692 ratings


“Lyrical, mesmerizing, and otherworldly. . . stunning proof that Nghi Vo is one of the most original writers we have today. A beautiful, brutal, monstrous Hollywood fantasy.”―Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Immortality is just a casting call away.

  • World Fantasy Award Finalist
  • Locus Award Finalist
  • Ignyte Award Finalist
  • An Amazon Best Book of 2022
  • One of NPR’s Best Books of 2022
  • Vulture’s #1 Fantasy Novel of 2022
  • Indie Next List Reading Group Book of 2023

Best of Year Selections at Apple Books | B&N Booksellers | LibraryReads | TIME Magazine | Oprah Daily | The Philadelphia Inquirer | Publishers Weekly | Buzzfeed | Chicago Review of Books | LitHub | Book Riot | Paste Magazine | Geek Girl Authority | Bookish | The Mary Sue | New York Public Library | Vulture | Locus Recommended Reading List | Kobo | The Quill to Live | Goodreads | L. A. Public Library | Audible | Amazon | NPR

  • An Indie Next and LibraryReads Pick
  • A Brooklyn Library Prize Finalist

Includes a Reading Group Guide

It was magic. In every world, it was a kind of magic.

“No maids, no funny talking, no fainting flowers.” Luli Wei is beautiful, talented, and desperate to be a star. Coming of age in pre-Code Hollywood, she knows how dangerous the movie business is and how limited the roles are for a Chinese American girl from Hungarian Hill―but she doesn't care. She’d rather play a monster than a maid.

But in Luli's world, the worst monsters in Hollywood are not the ones on screen. The studios want to own everything from her face to her name to the women she loves, and they run on a system of bargains made in blood and ancient magic, powered by the endless sacrifice of unlucky starlets like her. For those who do survive to earn their fame, success comes with a steep price. Luli is willing to do whatever it takes―even if that means becoming the monster herself.

Siren Queen offers up an enthralling exploration of an outsider achieving stardom on her own terms, in a fantastical Hollywood where the monsters are real and the magic of the silver screen illuminates every page.

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ISBN-10

1250820561

ISBN-13

978-1250820563

Print length

304 pages

Language

English

Publisher

Tor Books

Publication date

May 29, 2023

Dimensions

5.4 x 0.8 x 8.25 inches

Item weight

2.31 pounds


Product details

ASIN :

B09C4F52CS

File size :

6186 KB

Text-to-speech :

Enabled

Screen reader :

Supported

Enhanced typesetting :

Enabled

X-Ray :

Enabled

Word wise :

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Editorial reviews

"Nghi Vo’s reimagining of old Hollywood as a world rife with fae trickery, ambition, and greed is as clever as it is dazzling, as incisive as it is empowering. Vo’s heroine is captivating, her atmosphere heady and sensual, her storytelling spellbinding. Escape into this book, but be warned―it may not let you go."―Olivie Blake, New York Times-bestselling author of The Atlas Six

“Siren Queen establishes Vo as an uncommonly talented new voice in fantasy, one who writes from a place of anger, insight, and deep compassion.”--Vulture

"Vo creates an absorbing narrative about success and survival."―Time Magazine

"Nghi Vo can take even the most ordinary of actions and describe it in a way you never thought of before and do it with heartbreaking beauty and layers of subtext."―NPR

"Imagines the golden age of Hollywood as a fantastical world where monsters control the industry through dark rituals of blood and ancient magic. But Luli Wei is set on becoming a star no matter the cost, taking readers on an enthralling journey to achieve stardom on her own terms."―The Washington Post

"Were you mesmerised by the enchantment of Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus and the glamour of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo? Then you’ll fall in love with this."―HuffPost UK

"This riveting novel so deeply enmeshes magic with reality that it often feels impossible to differentiate the two. It’s a breathtaking read."―Buzzfeed

“Nghi Vo has become one of my favorite writers, and Siren Queen is lush and brilliant, a mesmerizing journey into a pre-code Hollywood that is all sharp edges, with the darkest magic and highest stakes.”―Martha Wells, author of Network Effect

"Vo imagines the golden age of Hollywood as full of fey and dangerous creatures ready to claim your soul in exchange for fame on the big screen. . . . This book kept me up reading until the late hours."―Rebecca Roanhorse, New York Times bestselling author of Black Sun

“Searing and seductive, Siren Queen is the kind of book that leaves you wrecked on its shores. When I look up at the stars, I'll think of Luli.”―Alix E. Harrow, author of Starling House

“In this stellar novel, Vo turns Hollywood into a fairyland―the kind from the old stories, sharp and dangerous―and laces the sparkling silver romance of the movies with a dark, exploitative, hungry greed. . . . Pair that vivid world with the stubborn, passionate Luli and a pace that turns from slow and delightfully sexy to vast and terrifying with the turn of a page and you have the brilliantly searing Siren Queen.”―Booklist (starred review)

“Vo’s spellbinding latest solidifies her position as a force to be reckoned with in speculative fiction. [Her] hypnotic prose blends metaphor with magic so seamlessly that reality itself becomes slippery. Her dazzling voice, evocative scene setting, and ambitious protagonist make this a knockout.”―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Movie magic is made manifest, beguiling, and deadly in Vo’s tale about Luli, a Chinese American girl who is determined to realize her dreams of movie stardom. . . . Luli is a compelling character both on and off the screen in this story that takes the mythmaking of Hollywood and transforms it and her into something transcendent. Highly recommended."―Library Journal (starred review)

"Vo packs the novel with themes of racism, queer identity, immigrant experience and the freedom to define one's own life and relationships, while maintaining a richly cultivated and dreamlike world. With lush imagery and a gorgeously rendered atmosphere worthy of its complex heroine,Siren Queen is magical realism at its most beautiful and intoxicating."―Shelf Awareness (starred review)

"A piece of perfection. It is queer and it is unapologetic and it is loving and it is a reminder that we can survive our demons, that we can outsmart them, that we can beat them at their own game."―Cassandra Khaw, USA Today bestselling author of Nothing But Blackened Teeth

“The book of my dreams―vivid, sensual, frightening, and inexpressibly gorgeous, often in the same sentence. . . . Nghi Vo is a magician―no―maybe a god.”―Kelly Robson, author of Gods, Monsters & the Lucky Peach

"It’s a clever bit of craftsmanship the way Nghi Vo braids the fantastical into the earthly in her story of a queer Chinese American actress breaking into the movie biz at the dawn of the talkie era."―The Philadelphia Inquirer

“This sharp, chilly book is a stunning and sapphic book of fae-like negotiations and traps, of predatory directors and monsters lurking in every shadow, but is powered by Luli’s passion and fierce determination to succeed.”--Book Riot

“A harrowing, fantastical journey through an alternate pre-code Hollywood, where magic is rampant, contracts with the studios are Faustian, and movie stars literally inhabit the night sky if they are lucky enough to rise. It is also a journey of self-discovery, love found, lost, and found again.”--L.A. Public Library

“Early Hollywood meets monsters, magical realism, and social commentary.”―Fodors

“From the author of The Chosen and the Beautiful, a queer spin on The Great Gatsby, comes the story of Luli Wei, a Chinese American actress in the golden age of Hollywood. She gets her break playing monsters, and through these roles learns to outmaneuver men who seek to control her.”―USA Today

"Vo’s darkly delicious tale will linger in the wings of your imagination for a long time to come."―Book Riot, Best of the Year feature

"A page-turner that is not your standard beach read."―National Trust for Historic Preservation

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Sample

ACT ONE

I

Wolfe Studios released a tarot deck’s worth of stories about me over the years. One of the very first still has legs in the archivist’s halls, or at least people tell me they see it there, scuttling between the yellowing stacks of tabloids and the ancient silver film that has been enchanted not to burn.

In that first story, I’m a leggy fourteen, sitting on the curb in front of my father’s laundry on Hungarian Hill. I’m wearing waxy white flowers in my hair, and the legendary Harry Long himself, coming to pick up a suit for his cousin’s wedding, pauses to admire me.

“Hola, China doll,” he says, a bright red apple in his hand. “Do you want to be a movie star?”

“Oh sir,” I’m meant to have replied, “I do not know what a movie star is, but would you give me that apple? I am so very hungry.”

Harry Long, who made a sacrifice of himself to himself during the Santa Ana fires when I turned twenty-one, laughed and laughed, promising me a boatload of apples if I would come to the studio to audition for Oberlin Wolfe himself.

That’s bullshit, of course.

What halfway pretty girl didn’t know what the movies were? I knew the names of the summer queens and the harvest kings as well as I knew the words “chink” and “monkey face,” hurled at me and my little sister as we walked hand in hand to the Chinese school two miles from our house. I knew them as well as I knew the lines in my mother’s face, deeper every year, and the warring heats of the Los Angeles summer and the steam of the pressing room.

The year I was seven, my father returned from Guangzhou to stay with us in America, and they built the nickelodeon between our laundry and the Chinese school. The arcade was far better than any old apple, and from the first, I was possessed, poisoned to the core by ambition and desire. The nickelodeon took over a space that had once sold coffins, terrible luck whether you were Chinese, Mexican, or German, but the moment they opened their doors and lit up the orangey-pink neon sign overhead, COMIQUE in the cursive I was having such trouble with, they were a modest success.

Luli and I were walking home one hot day, and we would have kept walking if the tall woman lounging in her ticket booth hadn’t tipped an extravagant wink at me. Her skin was a rich black, and her hair was piled up on her head in knots so intricate it hurt my eyes. It wasn’t until we got a little closer that I could see her eyes gleamed with the same orangey-pink of the sign overhead, and even then, I might have decided it was too late.

“We’re showing Romeo and Juliet today,” she said with a wide smile. “If you hurry, you can still get seats.”

“I don’t have anything to pay with,” I muttered, ashamed to even be caught wanting, but the woman only smiled wider.

“Well, it’s a nickel if you’re ordinary, but you girls aren’t, are you?”

Up until that very moment, Luli and I would have given absolutely anything to be ordinary, to live in one of the pastel boxes off of Hungarian Hill, to have curly blond or brown hair instead of straight black, and to have pop eyes instead of ones that looked like slits carved into the smooth skin of a melon.

The way the beautiful Black woman spoke, however, I started to wonder. If I couldn’t be ordinary, maybe I could be something better instead.

Maybe I could get into the nickelodeon.

Luli tugged at my hand fretfully, but I squeezed tighter, comforting and bullying at once.

“We’re not ordinary at all,” I declared. “And we don’t have any nickels.”

The woman touched a neatly manicured nail to her full lower lip, and then she smiled.

“An inch of your hair,” she said at last. “Just one inch for two of you.”

“Sissy, let’s go home,” my sister begged in Cantonese, but I scowled at her and she subsided.

“Just one inch,” I said, as if I had any control over it. “And why do you want it, anyway?”

She helped me climb onto the spinning chrome stool with its red vinyl cushion; I remember the way the heat stuck it to my thighs where my thin dress rode up. I was already tall for my age. She swept a neat white cape around me, and as she snipped at my waist-length hair with a flashing pair of shears, she explained.

“An inch of hair is two months of your life,” she said. “Give or take. An inch … that’s your father coming home, your mother making chicken and sausage stew, skinning your knee running from the rough boys…”

It made sense, or at least I didn’t want her to think that I didn’t understand. She wrapped an inch of my hair into a little packet of silk, tucking it into the antique cash register, and then she handed my sister and me two grubby olive-green tickets. I still have my ticket in a small box with some other mementos, next to a smooth lock of butter-gold hair and a withered white flower with a rust-red center. My sweat made the cheap ink go blurry, but you can still see the COMIQUE stamp as well as its sigil, the sign of the wheel of fortune.

The nickelodeon was full of muttering patrons, the darkness waiting and full of potential. We were small enough that no one cared if we squeezed onto the edges of the front-row seats, and in a moment, the flicker started.

It was magic. In every world, it is a kind of magic.

Silver light painted words on the flat, dark screen in front of us, and I didn’t have to read for Luli because the immigrants around us were sounding out the words quietly.

It was Romeo and Juliet as performed by Josephine Beaufort and George Crenshaw, two of the last silent greats. She looked like a child compared to the man who had loved the Great Lady of Anaheim, but it didn’t matter, not when she filled up the screen with her aching black eyes, when his lip trembled with passion for the girl of a rival family.

Their story was splattered over the screen in pure silver and gouts of black blood. First Romeo’s friend was killed, and then Juliet’s cousin, and then Romeo himself, taking a poison draught that left him elegantly sprawled at the foot of her glass coffin.

When Juliet came out, she gasped silently with horror at her fallen lover, reaching for his empty vial of poison. She tried to tongue the last bit out, but when no drop remained, she reached for his dagger.

It wasn’t Juliet any longer, but instead it was Josephine Beaufort, who was born Frances Steinmetz in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She might have been born to a janitor and a seamstress, but in that moment, she was Josephine Beaufort, bastard daughter of an Austrian count and a French opera singer, just as much as she was Juliet Capulet.

The entire nickelodeon held its breath as her thin arms tensed, the point of the dagger pressed not to her chest where a rib or her sternum might deflect it, but against the softest part of her throat.

Her mouth opened, and a dark runnel of blood streamed down her unmarked white throat. She paused, long enough to build empires, long enough for a dead lover to marvelously revive. Then her arms tensed, her fingers tightened, and the dagger disappeared into her flesh, all that white destroyed with a river of black blood. It covered her breast and her white lace gown, speckling her round cheeks and marring her dulling eyes.

She slumped over the body of George Crenshaw and the camera pulled back, back, back, showing us the spread of black blood over the chapel floor before finally going dark itself.

My sister set up a wail that was lost in the chatter of the other patrons.

“She died, the lady died,” Luli sobbed.

I took her hand, squeezing it like I did when I was trying to nerve us both up for another day beyond the safety of our bedroom, but my mind was a thousand miles away.

“No, she didn’t,” I said with absolute certainty.

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About the authors

Nghi Vo

Nghi Vo

NGHI VO is the author of the novels Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful, as well as the acclaimed novellas When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain and The Empress of Salt and Fortune, a Locus and Ignyte Award finalist and the winner of the Crawford Award and the Hugo Award. Born in Illinois, she now lives on the shores of Lake Michigan. She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind.

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Reviews

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5

692 global ratings

J

J

5

Wonderful

Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2023

Verified Purchase

What a wonderful book. Atmospheric, emotionally involving, creepy and just plain fun. I wish I could be part of this world, but at the same time I'd be terrified to.

3 people found this helpful

Bernice Olivas

Bernice Olivas

5

Absolutely gorgeous

Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2024

Verified Purchase

It's rare that a story makes me cry for the sheer beauty of it, but this one did. This one did.

kris lim

kris lim

5

satisfying and vindicating

Reviewed in the United States on June 3, 2024

Verified Purchase

The magic realism of this book is quite sneaky, and in retrospect, solidly well crafted, if disorienting initially. It’s so hard to tell what’s metaphorical or not (answer: nothing is metaphorical it is all ALL literal).

This era and the subject matter and the tone and the world building all come together in an absolute symphony of literary pleasure.

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