Chosen Ones
I wanted to love this. I really, really did. But it just fell flat.
Remember the YA trilogy Divergent? (Remember how disappointing it ended?? LOL.) Well, author Veronica Roth is back, but this time, with a fantasy novel for adults. The premise of Chosen Ones is super intriguing: What happens after a “chosen one” saves the world and defeats the Dark Lord? What comes next? In Roth’s world, there are five chosen ones: Sloane, Matt, Esther, Albie, and Ines. They were chosen by a prophecy to defeat an evil villain and save the world. They did that, but now it’s 10 years later, and they are all still struggling. Roth centers on Sloane, who struggles with PTSD and night terrors, hates the celebrity spotlight on her and the others, and is still navigating her relationship with Matt.
BUT as soon as the premise is established (five Chosen Ones, all struggling a decade later), about 100 pages in, Roth shifts the entire plot — it becomes something totally unexpected. I am not going to spoil it, but I was disappointed. I wish she had lingered in that idea of the PTSD of being a Chosen One, without falling back on conventional and tired tropes about fantasy novels. It was so subversive! Then it was so… not.
As Naomi Novik writes in The New York Times Book Review, “Here, Roth trades the world Sloane saved, the world we’ve begun to live in, for a parallel one swamped with exposition and a fresh case of mortal peril. All the characters we were starting to care about are put to one side along with Sloane’s relationships with them; new ones are quickly pushed into a prominence that feels unearned, especially after the slow build of the first half of the book.” She continues, “it’s with the slightly frustrating sense that you might have wanted the story that wasn’t told more than the one you were given: the one offered by the first part with all its ugly complexities, full of Sloane’s drifting and pain, the smirking hunger of the reporters and the public, the smaller but infinitely painful stakes.”
Ugh. Can someone write that book, please!?
Rating: ★★★
Get it here: https://bookshop.org/a/7347/9780358164081
