“The sea was tender and forever, and the horizon never came closer...”
-Vincent Chu, Nice Places, 287
Every now and then, between our endless emails and lists of errands, a weathered thought whispers, what if I just left? Forget the plans and book the trip—one way—to a place where no one knows our name because surely, there must be something new left to experience. It is a romantic dream we all cling to when the tide of our monotony rises and the thought of a hundred tomorrows that look like today threaten to bowl us over: the warm-lit corner cafe at dusk; the hush of brambling, country roads; the swell of citrus on the coast.
With cunning prose and a tender underbelly, Vincent Chu’s debut novel, Nice Places (Forest Avenue Press, 2026) promises to turn travel narrative on its head while making the reader ask, why has it not always been like this?
When Georgie quits his nearly tenured post at Oats Technology in pursuit of travel, his excited rush is cut off at the knees as he is robbed by a monk and brains himself off the steps of Little Constantinople in an attempted chase. He wakes instead in the vibrant, unexplored Panhandle of his own city; yet, Georgie might yet still assure the outside world that his exploration with skillful frames of towering landscapes, a touch of research, and aid from Chu’s delightful cast of quirky characters. Georgie recreates posts from his journey around the world, with perfectly positioned puddles cast as flooding oceans and dinner’s shared, cabside across candle light, only to find that the truth of his photographs speak to spirits coveted and long forgotten.
Thus, it is no big surprise to say that this book is delightful for all the ways one might expect—but it is more so for the ways you never see coming. I love a book that unnerves me without warning, extra points if it does so by making me consider the story through my own eyes. Georgie wants to escape, he is unhappy with the routine of his day, and I mean, what is more relatable than that? But he doesn’t leave. The universe, it seems, won’t allow him, and he spends the remainder of the novel wrestling with the idea of what he wants in mind with the pull of what he is discovering of his needs. Would he be happy if he could become content staying? Maybe. Depends on if he learns to be okay with some discomfort in order to grow—change. Of the many fantastic lines I dog-eared and highlighted in this novel, a pickling metaphor aptly captures the heart of Georgie’s (and human nature’s) journey:
“Pickling gave him particular joy, knowing that as the world turned, these vegetables sat quietly in jars, fermenting and gaining new qualities.” (160).
Cucumbers become pickles with the simple work of two hands and time—it’s that easy—and to those of us who mirror the trappings of Georgie’s 9 to 5? We want that change, especially when what we have makes us unhappy. He is our escape and with him we run fast and far from our own, but Chu’s story asks what does it matter if what we escape from arrives with us, no matter how far the shore? It is the tone that shone throughout the novel. For, while it is no more difficult to cheer for Georgie (a victorious voice against the burnout), than it is to be swept up in the beauty of Chu’s descriptions—to feel as if we were, too, waking under “salmon” skies—one cannot escape the feel of some aching worry throbbing beneath each line (144). It is in the language, a desire for Ant to “walk delicately” to save from “trembl[ing] the earth,” as if it were a delicate landscape and one wrong step might throw our progress off (104). That is the beautiful irony of this novel, because when it seems that Georgie is superficially at his highest, his posts are performing double or he is a “warm bod[y]” contentedly wrapt around another, there remains the feeling that it might all shatter in the next line (144). Is it the fear of being found out for his fake posts? Is it that Ant, his co-creator and companion, might leave? Yes and no. It raises something greater, a simple fear that Chu strings along, building with each sentence until the close of the novel turns a shattered mirror on the reader: human behavior.
Chu’s novel interrogates the root of our desire for travel through a twenty-first century lens, critiquing the idea that it might heal regrets of aging or general unhappiness, but only if others respect what they see in us: how we “present” ourselves as Georgie only becomes content with as more people begin to covet him for his choices (113). And yet, he remains unmoored, moving farther into the charade of his travel because he finds just what he was looking for—escape, but only in the moment. For, it is quick that the “world simply stop[s] caring about” one post for another, and Georgie is left to face the underlying reason that he wanted to travel: all the things he wanted to escape (234). This regret is a powerful emotion, one so cutting that it is only human nature to want to avoid looking too closely at it. Chu’s novel is an interesting look at it because it allows for distance, granting the idea and feel of happiness building throughout Georgie’s becoming and time in the Panhandle, but the threat of that sadness makes the reality of it stand a veritable cairn. Racing from our regrets, using distraction upon distraction works like adding stones, each one impressive, but the higher we stack without grounding, the more precarious the balance becomes.
Balance here is key: just like the tether between Chu’s dynamic writing in breaking Georgie down and building him back up again. For, with his rich and arresting descriptions—scribbling a “tender and forever...horizon,” always just out of reach (until it’s not)—Chu manages to preserve the timelessness we enjoy of traveling—its breathtaking views and the wonder of discovery, matched only by the intimacy of being invited in. And yet, he broadens what it can achieve in its sharing and elevates it, weaving complex and quirky characters who share as much adventure in creating community right at home as they do in dreamed-up landscapes.
In Nice Places, Vincent Chu manages to recover the art of the travel narrative, dusting off the ashes of our expectations and capturing, with humorous, cutting prose, a picture of the places and people who revive us..