fantasy
Chosen Ones is marketed
as Veronica Roth's (author of the Divergent series) adult debut but it
reads like a YA novel through and through. The characters are supposed to
be in their 20s or 30s but, because of events that happened in their teen
years, they are all sort of stunted emotionally; I often had to remind
myself that they were not 19 years old. There isn't graphic sex or
violence worse than what you read in Divergent or Hunger Games... truly,
if your YA reads this book they won't be shocked, mortified, or
otherwise disturbed.
This book took me a longer than normal time to read because I often found it slow-going and occasionally boring; there was nothing pulling me back to the pages. Our main character, Sloane, is purposefully not very likable and therefore it becomes difficult to care about a story that ultimately revolves around her.
That said, the book starts out with an interesting premise- a dark entity (the Dark One) comes to Earth and a group of teens are chosen to defeat him. This book however, starts after the defeat- what happens to these teen heroes when there's no more hero work to be done? That was an interesting idea & I really wish it had been explored a bit further.
But of course, we have to dive back into the drama as the jacket summary explains, "the Dark One's reign never really ended." Sigh. One of the original Chosen dies, though remains a character- sort of as a conscience- and another we might as well never have met at all. Once the second section of the book picked up I kept waiting for some reason for this character to exist, but it never came.
The third section of the book is the most interesting & not surprisingly where all the threads begin to tie together. Sadly, my two favorite characters came from this back half of the book and I wish I'd been able to learn more about both of them. The third section is full of action and information and really helped push me to finish the book.
So, while it starts slowly, the book closes well. In fact, the ending is the reason it gets 3 stars instead of 2
This book took me a longer than normal time to read because I often found it slow-going and occasionally boring; there was nothing pulling me back to the pages. Our main character, Sloane, is purposefully not very likable and therefore it becomes difficult to care about a story that ultimately revolves around her.
That said, the book starts out with an interesting premise- a dark entity (the Dark One) comes to Earth and a group of teens are chosen to defeat him. This book however, starts after the defeat- what happens to these teen heroes when there's no more hero work to be done? That was an interesting idea & I really wish it had been explored a bit further.
But of course, we have to dive back into the drama as the jacket summary explains, "the Dark One's reign never really ended." Sigh. One of the original Chosen dies, though remains a character- sort of as a conscience- and another we might as well never have met at all. Once the second section of the book picked up I kept waiting for some reason for this character to exist, but it never came.
The third section of the book is the most interesting & not surprisingly where all the threads begin to tie together. Sadly, my two favorite characters came from this back half of the book and I wish I'd been able to learn more about both of them. The third section is full of action and information and really helped push me to finish the book.
So, while it starts slowly, the book closes well. In fact, the ending is the reason it gets 3 stars instead of 2
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