Book #39: The Chosen One (Whitney Book 19)

Title: The Chosen One
Author: Carol Lynch Williams

As I read the four other books in the YA category, I kept trying to weigh the pros and cons of each novel. Each one had significant strengths, but none was without its weaknesses. By the end of the fourth book, I wasn't at all sure which book would get my vote. So I was relieved and excited as I got sucked into The Chosen One in the very first chapter.

Like the other books in the category, The Chosen One isn't without its faults. With it's somewhat sensational topic and dramatic ending, I worry that The Chosen One may be whetting young girls' appetites for an adulthood of avidly reading Jodi Picoult, but I guess there could be worse things in life. Although the book, with its themes of polygamy, evokes the modern sections of David Ebershoff's The 19th Wife (especially in its treatment of the "lost boys" and discussion of safe houses) and Big Love (you really didn't think you'd get through this review without a Big Love reference, did you? Kyra's father likely points to Bill Henricksen as the example of how he can never escape life on the compound), but the writing style of the book, with short, beautiful, simple paragraphs, most reminded me of Patricia McCormick's Sold, published in 2008 about a young girl (about the same age as Kyra) sold into sexual slavery. And while Kyra was being sold into the bonds of holy matrimony, as a thirteen-year-old forced to marry her geriatric uncle as his seventh wife, it was as much a type of slavery as Lakshmi endured in McCormick's novel.

I think that The Chosen One is an important novel for young girls to read, both because it broadens their horizons and helps them realize that most of us in America have it pretty good, but there are those who suffer a lot. I particularly liked the scene in which Kyra and her sister and her mothers went fabric shopping (for Kyra's wedding dress) followed by lunch at Applebee's. I think that many teenagers wouldn't think twice about eating at Applebee's, other than perhaps to wrinkle their noses at the experience, but it's a first for Kyra, and she's overwhelmed both by the food and by the stares she attracts from the other patrons in the restaurant.

One of the things that I've always found most fantastical about Big Love (and the reason why I finally stopped watching it after three or four seasons) was the evilness of the polygamist leaders on the compound. I had a hard time believing that the leaders cared enough about people leaving the flock that they'd be out for blood. In the modern Mormon church (interestingly, Williams, never makes overt references to Mormonism in The Chosen One) we like to keep our members active, but I've never seen someone's inactivity making them the subject of death threats and vendettas. Maybe I'm naive about fundamentalism, though, because Williams portrays the polygamist prophet and his apostles as just as cold-hearted and lustful as Roman Grant and his henchmen.