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👋 Hello readers!👋 It's May, which means it's time to start reading Chosen Ones! Veronica Roth’s highly-anticipated adult fiction debut asks the question: What happens to people who've saved the world, after the rest of the world moves on? It's a smart, nimble story about five disillusioned twentysomethings struggling to find the normalcy they granted the rest of the world when they destroyed the Dark One. But when one of the chosen five dies on the 10th anniversary of the Dark One's defeat, the survivors suspect the worst — that perhaps they aren’t actually rid of it.
Last month, you asked for a little more structure — so this month, we're going to start up a reading schedule! Obviously this is a ~suggested~ guide, but since the book is divided into pretty even sections, we'll use those to break up discussion threads in the Facebook group:
MAY 1-10: Part One
If you haven't already, be sure to check out the first two chapters of Chosen Ones here. And as always, you can reply directly to this email with your comments or questions!
Happy reading, Arianna
đź“š Behind the Book đź“š
We asked Veronica Roth to tell us a bit about how Chosen Ones came to be. Here's what she had to say. Like any good reader of science fiction and fantasy, I grew up on a diet of “chosen one” stories. You probably did, too, so you know the drill: a character, usually young, is set apart for a special destiny. Usually it involves saving the world. Harry Potter, Buffy, Neo, Paul Atreides, the Animorphs —those are the Chosen Ones I grew up with. And I loved watching them save the day. I even wrote about one in my first book, Divergent.
A couple years ago, I got curious about what might become of our heroes after. Not so much the next adventure, but the next mundane thing. The first time Harry visited the grocery store after bringing down the Dark Lord. How Paul Atreides felt when he was getting ready for bed, after taking control of the Empire. The first time Neo experimented with controlling the Matrix, after he realized he was the One. (Personally, I would try to walk through a wall, cartoon-style.)
Chosen Ones is an exploration of that after. It’s about the mundane moments of my five Chosen Ones — boobytrapping their apartments out of lingering paranoia, deciding what kind of low key disguise to wear on the El — but also their big ones — revisiting their trauma as the world starts to break around them. It’s my way of playing with our Big Stories, our Chosen One stories, while also taking their traumatic effects seriously.
But the longer I wrote, the more my focus narrowed from the Big Idea of the five of them in their aftermath to the character of Sloane herself: lost, angry, clever…and trying to figure out what to be, now that she’s no longer a Chosen One.
Points of inspiration: Deb Olin Unferth The places, people, and things Deb Olin Unferth was thinking about while writing Barn 8. Photo by Richard Price on Unsplash Farm animal sanctuaries that you can visit and hang out with the animals. Some even have B&Bs on them, and you can wake in the morning to crowing roosters. I particularly love Woodstock Sanctuary, SASHA Farm, and Animal Place. The book Chickens’ Lib by Clare Druce, a memoir-history of the Chickens’ Lib movement in England. So charming and funny! Mendocino, California. My friend, Lucy Corin, and I rented a tiny house in the redwoods for a few days, and I wrote some pivotal pieces of the book there, between long forest walks. The Patti Smith song “Kimberly.” The book The Known World by Edward P. Jones, for craft and structure and urgency. This may be my favorite book of all time. The Wes Anderson movies The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited The Hal Hartley movie The Book of Life The book Underground, which is a compilation of the first 15 issues of the 1990s magazine of the Animal Liberation Front, a group of anarchist animal activists. Really interesting stuff. Not to try at home! Caterpillars. I started growing milkweed in the final year of writing the book, and a hundred caterpillars came and ate it all. It was beautiful to watch and felt somehow connected to the world I was creating.
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