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Fantasy Review: The Chosen Ones

I found The Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth by skimming the "recently added" section of my (pre-move) favorite bookstore's online inventory. They were doing one of their quarterly 1/2 off everything sale, so I got this book for $3.50 plus shipping. When I got it and realized it was published in April of 2020 I was a little concerned. I know that adult fantasy book twitter isn't quite as active as YA book twitter, but still--I had assumed this book was a couple years old since I heard absolutely nothing about it. 

In the beginning, this book sucked me right in. I read the first half in a day--and then once I got to Part Two, shelved it for a couple weeks. The shift in setting threw me enough to knock away some of my ability to continue plowing through. 

This makes me think of something that Sarah Maclean said in a recent podcast interview--although she writes romance and not fantasy, she said something along the lines of, if it takes you more than 6 hours to finish reading one of her books, then she's done something wrong. The tension should keep you reading straight through. With fantasy there's less of an expectation that a person can (or should) be able to read a book straight through in a since night, but I think it's worth thinking through. If a fantasy author builds in a twist that requires the reader to re-orient themselves to a completely new set of world-building rules, what does that do to their ability to continue reading? As authors we should (I think) try to make it hard for the reader to put the book down. Plot twists that haven't been threaded into the reader expectations can throw the reader right out of the book. 

By the end of the book, I kind of saw why this book wasn't well publicized. Unlike the last few books I'd read, there wasn't really a clear narrative arc pulling me through the story. I wasn't sure what Roth wanted me to get from the ending. On the whole, the book just felt...confused. 

All that aside, what I did love about this book (and why I will probably keep it on my shelves instead of re-homing it) is that this book is a love letter to Chicago, the rest of Illinois, and the midwest. I loved all the newspaper articles supposedly from Peoria and Buffalo Grove, the Amtrak ride from Union Station to Saint Louis, the view of the lake while driving down Lakeshore Drive to Hyde Park, all the scurrying over the bridge right by my former office. As someone who just moved out of Chicago, reading this brought a nostalgic smile to my face. 

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