Don't Sleep with the Dead (Chosen and the Beautiful #2)[June 5, 2025]

[Yanique, Thread Master]

This is a Buddy Read for Don't Sleep with the Dead by Nghi Vo starting on June 5, 2025.


Happy Reading!

[Nirkatze]

Thank you!

Series schedule
1. The Chosen and the Beautiful (May 5) [link]
2. Don't Sleep with the Dead (Jun 5)

[Timelord Iain, Tech Support]

I don't know what to make of this... it's so short, flying by, not much time for plot, and I didn't love Chosen and Beautiful, so half of it is just going in one ear and out the other...

Feels crazy that Nick published a book about book 1 of the series...

[Timelord Iain, Tech Support]

I got to the end and was like "it's over?"

[Nirkatze]

Read this this morning and yeah, damn this was short... Felt more like an epilogue than a sequel...

I think that Nick's book is supposed to be The Great Gatsby... basically he's F. Scott Fitzgerald in this situation... And Nick was based on himself, and the books he wrote were partially memoir/autobiographical/wish fulfillment. Fitzgerald was also from St. Paul, the "other book" mentioned, about France, would be Tender Is the Night... but Fitzgerald wrote it after Gatsby...

I was surprised that (view spoiler)[this was set 20 years later... seems like that's when Nick published the "book"? What has he been up to in the past 20 years then?

The twist--on Demons "eating" the Damned, absorbing their memories and being able to take on their bodies, with Nick actually having been a Demon himself, since the War... a nice twist in something so short. Makes me think of how the previous book, "The Chosen and the Beautiful" was a riff on Fitzgerald's "The Beautiful and the Damned"--and the MCs of this were both the Damned...

So all of the books were actually written by the Nameless Demon who took over Nick... and that's the one who fell in love with Gatsby... maybe that's why he could rip Gatsby out of December... For something so short--because it's so short--it leaves me wondering about the worldbuilding here...

There was one line I liked about Jordan, saying that "If she wasn't foreign and a woman, she'd've been a great politician"--sad that this still holds true in a lot of places. (hide spoiler)]