great book wow. recommend having nothing else to do but read for a day or 2. the character development was great as as well as the plot.

I'd just declared that I'm tired of Jane Austen retellings and here comes Chau with what is probably the most enjoyable one I've ever read. It's Pride and Prejudice in Aughts (early 2000s) New York with an (at least to me) very authentic Chinese-American spin.
Elizabeth Chen lives with her four sisters and parents in a tiny apartment in Chinatown, where they've lived for years as a messy, noisy, mostly happy family. She's a fierce defender of her neighborhood's character and is worried it will get destroyed when investors buy out the run-down rec center that gave her and her family so much support over the years. Then she meets the young investors, and one Darcy Wong arrives to add some excitement to her life.
The way that it follows the plot and big points of the original while being wholly new and modern is impressive. The fact that Chau translated the social class and cultural elements expertly from Austen's England to modernist Chinatown in New York is beyond impressive because it feels both familiar and new. The characters and situations feel like comfortable old favorites, but they read like a new story that I was excited to follow.

Very happy thanks to NetGalley and HarperVia for the very fun read!

Good Fortune is a retelling of Pride and Prejudice in New York City Chinatown. Elizabeth Chen is the second oldest of five daughters and is trying to find a career that matches her morals and save her community from huge external changes to the neighborhood. Darcy Wong is a real estate mogul who is working to update the community center in Elizabeth's neighborhood. This the fourth Pride and Prejudice retelling that I have read, all of which had differences in the depicted cultures. I like reading retellings of classic literature and was excited to read this one!

I think that Good Fortune did a great job of balancing new material and sticking to the general plot beats of the original book. It's hard to combine snappy dialogue, memorable characters, a good setting, swoony romance, AND have it feel like an actual reimagining instead of "loosely inspired." This felt like an actual retelling that felt new in a lot of areas. I liked the reimagining of the side characters and found the romances engaging.. I was really interested to see how Elizabeth and Darcy would get together, and that is not something that I feel very often!

One thing that I think the book did much better than the other modern retellings that I have read is that it really created a sense of community in where the characters lived outside of their homes and families. Elizabeth caring about what happened to the community center and the characters' ties to the community center and neighborhood in general made it feel like Elizabeth existed in a different social sphere instead of just a different family situation to Darcy. I understood her not wanting to move away and her resistance to people who don't understand the community coming in and wanting to make changes. This made sense to me in a way that some other retellings don't.

It wasn't super clear to me that this book was set in the 90s. I started out thinking that it was contemporary, but then a Tamagochi is mentioned on that page. Characters use landlines and someone mentions having a pager, which made me revise my understanding of the setting about halfway through. I wish it had been a bit more clear about when the book was set so I didn't feel as much like a bewildered historian throughout my read.

As with a lot of retellings, the plot fell a little flat for me. I liked the changes, but it was really similar to the Lizzie Bennet Diaries in terms of updating the marriage proposals to jobs and Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal in terms of the time period (90s or early 2000s). This book was definitely different from both of those retellings, but the changes didn't engage me as much as I was the first time I experienced them in those other forms of media.

Overall, I really enjoyed this retelling and recommend it to anyone who wants a new perspective on Pride and Prejudice! 3.75 stars from me rounded up to 4. Thank you to HarperVia and NetGalley for the electronic advanced reader's copy of this book; my thoughts are my own!

Good Fortune by C.K. Chau is a modern day retelling of 'Pride and Prejudice' set in a modern day Chinatown in New York. I love pride and Prejudice so went into this with high expectations. A lot of the same elements are there; girl meets arrogant boy, they don't like each other, drama ensues, etc. However, I was bored through most of it. The book didn't catch my attention like I was hoping it would. While I may not have enjoyed it, I can definitely see where others might.

"Good Fortune" by C.K. Chau is a captivating and thought-provoking adult novel that explores themes of identity, culture, and the complexities of pursuing one's dreams in the face of societal expectations. Chau's storytelling skill shines as they craft a tale of self-discovery, family dynamics, and the pursuit of happiness. The book's well-drawn characters and resonant plot create an immersive reading experience that resonates with readers interested in multicultural stories and women's fiction. Chau skillfully delves into the emotions of ambition, tradition, and the delicate balance between personal desires and cultural obligations, adding depth to the narrative. "Good Fortune" is a poignant reminder that finding one's true path often requires navigating the intersections of tradition and modernity, leaving readers with a sense of reflection and a renewed appreciation for the power of individual choices and the complexities of cultural heritage.

DNF @ 16%
I was having an extremely hard time getting into the writing and have not had any desire to pick this one up in about a month so I made the decision to DNF. I may come back to it at some point, we shall see.

I’m a huge Pride and Prejudice fan and I don’t think this worked well as a retelling, at all. I think this will be enjoyable to a lot of people, but not for me. Sorry.

I'm always really interested to pick up any Jane Austen retelling with a really original twist, ESPECIALLY P&P. With it being my favorite Austen novel, there's a lot to live up to here. Good Fortune absolutely did. From the beginning, I was absolutely absorbed by the quick witted dialog and the way I immediately fell in love with our Elizabeth. I also feel that the Chinese American influences, especially in the atmosphere of the iconic Chinatown really took the reins of the story and made it its own. And of course, the Elizabeth and Darcy romance is perfect, true to its source.

A strong debut by C.K. Chau! I was intrigued by the Pride and Prejudice-retelling angle of this, and enjoyed the explorations around family, social class, and romantic relationships. Also love that it's set in New York's Chinatown.

A confession: I don’t really like Jane Austen novels. To be fair, I’ve seemed to only have read Pride & Prejudice and the many retellings. Good Fortune is another retelling but with a NYC Chinatown spin.

I actually liked the updated Darcy and Elizabeth characters. I thought they had a fun and witty dynamic. The other sisters I liked less so but I appreciated the family dynamic as a whole. This seems to be so close to the actual P&P and I’d have loved for it to be more loosely based.

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperVia for this eARC. Good Fortune is out now.

I am so happy that I was given the opportunity to read this book. It is clever and as others have stated witty in its dialogue and this comes from someone who lives for dialogue in a book rather than over explanation of the surroundings. I enjoyed this book and would recommend to others.

This is a very cute retelling of Pride and and Prejudice but I feel the need to disclose the fact that I have never read Jane Austen’s P&P. I have tried 3 different times throughout my life (once in my teens, once in my 30’s, and again in my early 40’s) and I’ve put it down all 3 times. After reading Good Fortune, however, I’ll be giving it another try!
Set in the mid-noughties in NYC, Elizabeth Chen is the second oldest of 5 sisters and the one her parents worry about the most, despite her youngest sister being an aspiring model. This is because unlike her older sister who is in medical school, Elizabeth is perfectly happy working at a photo processing store and volunteering at the local community center. When the center is sold to a development group, Elizabeth worries it will change for the worse and sets her sights in making sure that doesn’t happen- even though that means having to deal with the irascible Darcy Wong. This book takes us on a year of Elizabeth’s life filled with anger, annoyance, laughter, and love.
I found this to be a fun take on Pride and Prejudice, but I know I would have gotten more out of it had I read the original first. I’ll be jumping into it today, though! Thank you to C.K. Chau and HaperVia for an advanced copy. This hit the shelves on July 11th.

Book Description:
Elizabeth Chen, affectionately known as LB, lives with her four sisters and parents in a tiny New York apartment. The favorite daughter of her father, Vincent, Elizabeth spends her time trying to better her community while fending off the well-meaning meddling of her mother, Jade. Enter the affluent Mr. Darcy Wong and his friend, Brendan Lee, and Mrs. Chen is laser-focused on furthering her daughters' futures.

My thoughts:
C.K. Chau has reimagined Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, highlighting Chinese culture and the challenges faced by minority communities. It was fun reading Chau's interpretation of Austen's characters, and just like the beloved inspiration, I adored the tension and interactions between Elizabeth and Darcy!

Read if you like:
• Pride and Prejudice
• Diverse reads
• Strong female MC

This was a Pride and Prejudice retelling set in NYC’s Chinatown with the Chen family. I think this retelling stuck too close to the source material and I would’ve preferred a twist or something more unique than being in NYC. Also, it was just too long. The characters were entertaining.

A compelling reworking of Pride and Prejudice, set in contemporary New York's Chinatown, with Elizabeth Chen, whose mother sells the rundown community center to developer Darcy Wong. Perfect for Janeites who love P & P variations with multicultural wit, flair, charm.

I really enjoyed this read. It had the right amount of characters I loved and those who got on my nerves. I loved seeing the cultural difference of the Elizabeth's family and Darcy's They are both Asian but cultural different because of their economics and where they were raised. I couldn't but this down. This is a cute summer read.

Super cute version of pride and prejudice. Some parts started off slow in the beginning and I love the themes of the Chinatown community center and connections to one’s neighborhood. Lydia was as usual an annoying character, but def recommend as a lighter read.

TLDR: This was a super charming retelling and the ways Chau brought the story into the 2000s was lovely, but some elements of the adaptation were more successful than others.

Good Fortune is such a lovely story! Some retellings lean too heavily into the mythology of the original story, but Chau’s versions of our favorite sisters felt real and textured. The story was super grounded in the setting of early 2000s New York City Chinatown. Rather than just a 2D set in the background, the setting played an integral role in the story and deepened our understanding of the characters.

The way 1813 social conventions were translated were clever. Chau updated and transformed the marriage mart into the expectations of marriage and career success that immigrant parents can have of their children. Romantic relationships were sometimes preserved and sometimes made business relationships instead, when appropriate. Everyone’s jobs and desires made a lot of sense with both the original characters and the new setting.

That said, I do think that there were scenes that would have been made stronger if they stuck less strictly to the original story. While, as a fan of P&P, I loved recognizing the scaffolding of the source material (and sometimes even nearly identical dialogue!), some of the Regency Era tension was less impactful in the modern setting. I found myself putting down the book at times because it felt too slow, and I realized the tension was too weak to adequately propel me forward in some sections.

In contrast, places where Chau deviated from the source material felt very impactful. The main deviation is that where the Bennetts, while facing uncertain futures, are still upper-middle class, the Chens are living month to month and constantly needing to stretch their money further. This precariousness gives Jade Chen (Mrs. Bennet) a more reasonable basis for the urgency she feels at seeing her daughters successfully fly the coop, despite her embarrassing social climber behavior. It seems that Chau might even be poking fun at Austen’s inherent class assumptions (and as much as I love Austen, let’s be real here) and it’s totally effective.

Lizzie’s passion for and commitment to her community adds a lot to her character (which I think is necessary for this contemporary version, since OG Lizzie has a lot of strong opinions but no aspirations) and also adds to the conflict between her and Darcy in the first half. His role in potentially ruining the rec center Lizzie hopes to save makes their class differences feel more tangible than just him having nice stuff and her living in a tiny apartment. It puts their entire experiences in opposition and Darcy’s values under question, which makes the tension between the two stronger, but Chau also manages to justify most of this while resolving their dislike, without making Darcy out to be a terrible person.

This book so quirky, so incredible as a journey! Thank you for this ARC ! I feel as if I was a part of the story on every page. #goodfortune #netgalley

4.5 stars

As a long time Jane Austen fan, I’ve re-read her most popular (and well-known) novel Pride and Prejudice more times than I can count since encountering it for the first time back in 8th grade (don’t ask me how long ago that was, lol). Given how much I love P&P (it’s definitely one of my favorite novels of all time), I’ve always been extremely wary of any books that attempt to retell or reimagine the classic in any way, shape, or form — that is to say, I try to avoid reading any retellings as much as possible. With that said, there are occasions (albeit rare) where I’m drawn to a book precisely because of its P&P and/or Austen adjacent angle and end up really glad that I decided to give the book a chance due to how much I enjoyed the experience. C.K. Chau’s debut novel Good Fortune, a contemporary retelling of P&P set in New York’s Chinatown, fit the bill perfectly.

I was actually first drawn to this book out of curiosity, as I was interested in seeing what a Chinese-American spin on P&P would look like. Then, after I read the premise, I was even more interested, as I saw that the book would combine several things that were long familiar to me — the Pride and Prejudice story, Chinese culture and traditions, an immigrant family story, cultural identity, and best of all, an entire cast of characters who were all ethnically Chinese (with the exception of one character). Once I started reading the book however, I was even more delighted to discover that the family at the center of the story (as well as most of the major characters) were all from Hong Kong (my birth city), and more importantly, the entire story would be permeated with not just Chinese culture, but more specifically Cantonese culture (which is what I grew up with and know very well). I can’t emphasize enough how rare it is to see Cantonese culture — my culture — represented so authentically in a mainstream American novel (and it’s even more refreshing to see both the good and the not-so-good aspects represented). I loved how Chau was able to seamlessly work in so many elements from a culture that I was more than familiar with: the family-run Chinese restaurant where everyone was expected to chip in to keep the business afloat; the nosy and gossipy neighborhood aunties with their relentlessly prying questions (one of my favorite scenes in the book was during Alexa’s wedding when the 5 Chen sisters were forced to politely endure the way-too-personal rapid-fire questions from a bunch of oblivious aunties — a “ritual” that I’ve endured countless times growing up, lol); the Cantonese turns-of-phrases sprinkled throughout the dialogue (in addition to the actual Cantonese words, I got a kick out of seeing colloquialisms such as “ai ya” and “aa” and the “la” at the end of some sentences); the descriptions of local Cantonese cuisine and dishes that, frankly, made me salivate; the Hong Kong pop culture references (I laughed when I saw TVB dramas mentioned at one point in the story); and what I loved most of all, the weekly Cantonese family tradition of yum cha (aka dim sum) — in one (amongst many) of my favorite scenes, Chau perfectly captured the “mad chaos” yum cha experience as we Cantonese are used to experiencing it: the standing room only wait amongst a sea of people for your number to be called, the musical chairs dance / fight for a table, the designated person in the family responsible for chasing down the aunties with the dim sum carts, then getting back to the table only to find that the only food left is whatever you have in your hand (which you had to claw tooth and nail to get), the entire meal taking up most of your morning, only to leave hungrier than when you first arrived…my first thought when I read that entire scene was that only someone who grew up immersed in the Cantonese culture could write a scene like that (needless to say, I LOVED IT!!!).

Of course, what would a P&P retelling be without the P&P story elements? In this aspect, I felt that Chau did a brilliant job. It was fascinating to see how she brought the story from 19th century Regency England to 21st century contemporary America, while also adapting to the modern sensibilities of the times. Most of the characters we’re familiar with are here (though some with different names and backgrounds): the Chen family headed by the father Vincent (who, like Mr Bennett, is constantly seeking peace from the chaos of the household), the mother Jade (a high-strung hypochondriac), and 5 daughters Jane, Elizabeth (nicknamed LB in the story), Mary, Kitty, and Lydia; Darcy Wong, his sister Geo (short for Georgiana); his friend Brendan Lee who has 2 sisters named Caroline and Louisa; Charlotte Luo (LB’s best friend); Geoffrey Collins (yes, that Collins), who is the only non-Chinese character in the story; Lady Catherine (yes, there is a character actually named “Right Honorable Lady Catherine”) and of course, the main villain Wickham (though he is not called anything close to Wickham in the story, but P&P fans will instantly recognize him as the Wickham equivalent). In terms of plot points, Chau definitely adapted the story to modern times — replacing marriage proposals with job offers, an email confession instead of a handwritten letter, fundraising galas instead of elaborate society balls, etc. (just a few examples). And YES, Pemberley absolutely makes an appearance (but you will have to read the book to find out how and what). Oh and there is PLENTY of Austen-style humor in here too (gosh, I can’t remember the last time I laughed so often while reading a novel).

A quick mention regarding our favorite couple (how could I resist?) — the Elizabeth in this story was actually more “bad-ass” than Austen’s original version, which I found interesting and cool (I ended up liking this version of Elizabeth as much as I did our beloved Lizzie). In terms of the character of Darcy in this story — he was ok, but it was honestly hard for me to picture a Chinese Darcy…regardless though, I think it’s going to be a losing battle no matter who tries to “become” Darcy, as whenever I hear that name, the only face that will forever come to mind is Colin Firth’s (lol).

By now, it’s probably pretty obvious how much I loved this one (though part of me is still a bit surprised). While it’s not necessary to have read Pride and Prejudice prior to reading this one (since the story works pretty well on its own), the reading experience is definitely a lot more fun and enjoyable if you’re familiar with the original story (and it’s a bonus if you’re familiar with the culture aspects as well). This clever and charming story ended up being the P&P retelling that I didn’t know I wanted to read. I can’t wait to see what C.K. Chau has in store for us next!

Received ARC from HarperVia Publishing via NetGalley.