Chosen Ones

Veronica Roth is better known for her YA work - this is her first dive into adult fantasy. She is still following the urban fantasy stylings that characterise her YA work, but taking on more mature themes. Chosen Ones is definitely a book of two halves with very contrasting styles and themes. The first half deals with what happens after a group of heroes save the world - the PTSD and the struggle to find normality. The second half takes these same heroes and asks them to save the world again.

I am going to take these to halves and discuss them separately. The first half examining the impact of what happens after you save the world was really intriguing. The subtle PTSD hints, the struggles to deal with fame and the inevitable historical revisionism that accompanies time all gave a fantastic sense of foreboding. This was wonderful high concept stuff that I have not seen properly addressed in these type of novels before.

The second half sees the heroes transported to another dimension and forced to save the world again. It provided a few interesting twists and some interesting world building, but felt a bit flat after that brilliant starting point. It all felt a bit too ‘hollywood'.

I wish this story could have kept on investigating and developing the themes it initially set out on rather than jumping to the generic actionfest it became. The second half isn't bad, but it just feels such a let down after the interesting setup that came before

Fuck, I absolutely loved this book.
The way the world is set up, explained is just fantastic and the characters are real and feel real. The way the author uses texts and textbooks and evidence Sloanne reads to explain more and give the reader more thoughts is incredible and it made me excited to figure out this mystery. When Sloanna steppped into the other world it gave me a new rush of mystery and excitement, especially with Mox in the picture and how real and painful her break-up with Matt turned out to be.
And the conclusion was hard and painful. And I especially loved Sloanne. She was not good nor bad. She was her own complex person who sometimes didn't make the right choice and I loved that about her, absolutely loved it.
When she collided the two worlds it just felt incredible. She had done something brave and selfish and yet it was something bad and hurtful to some.
It was an interesting read

I didn't like this as much as I'd hoped, and I've been chewing over why, and I think what I've come up with is that it's TOO ambitious? I've loved similar books like [b:The Magicians 6101718 The Magicians (The Magicians, #1) Lev Grossman https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1313772941l/6101718.SY75.jpg 6278977], [b:Carry On 32768522 Carry On (Simon Snow, #1) Rainbow Rowell https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1481729252l/32768522.SX50.jpg 43346673], etc, and I think what works for this kind of book–that's clearly looking to respond in a fanfiction-like way to existing properties, to say, “Yes, these plucky teens saved the world, but at what cost? Let's really dig into their trauma!” But those books function by making their canon so similar to Narnia/Harry Potter/etc that they work as an effective shorthand. Here, whatever it was that her Chosen Ones went through...I mean, there are familiar tropes here and there but overall it's original, it can't clearly be mapped onto a Voldemort or whatever. Which is fine, except that then to start 10 years later and be reacting to piecemeal bits of information...it's not quite so satisfying or comprehensible. that said, I liked Sloane as a prickly, traumatized heroine, and I enjoyed the story well enough. I liked the diversity of her crew of chosen ones though some of her talk about microaggressions etc felt a bit clunky? (A bit, perhaps, like Roth is someone who has been taken to task about such things in previous books but still doesn't feel totally comfortable writing about them? ah well a nice effort). This is her first “adult” book but it doesn't feel too different than her YA ones except that the characters are aged up (and eg talking about marriage). I feel like she could have made more of her “adult” status by making this longer and digging into all of the worldbuilding a bit more. eh!