The Chosen One: A Review by Eva Márquez
Title: The Chosen One
Author: Carol Lynch Williams
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Pub date: May 12, 2009
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0312555113
Pages: 224
Price: $9.99 (paperback)
.
Synopsis
Thirteen-year-old Kyra has grown up in an isolated community without questioning the fact that her father has three wives and she has twenty brothers and sisters. That is, without questioning them much – if you don’t count her secret visits to the Ironton County Mobile Library on Wheels to read forbidden books, or her meetings with Joshua, the boy she hopes to choose for herself instead of having a man chosen for her. But when the Prophet decrees that she must marry her sixty-year-old uncle – who already has six wives – Kyra must make a desperate choice in the face of violence and her own fears of losing her family forever.
My Thoughts
I need to preface this review by saying that I absolutely LOVE fundamental/compound-related fiction. I hand it to Carol, an author that never once used the word ‘Mormon’ in the entire book, but yet painted such a detailed picture of a fictional fundamentalist Mormon sect and its hierarchical structure and arcane (and unhealthy?) practices. I truly enjoyed reading the story of Kyra and her trials and tribulations of growing up on a fundamentalist compound. As California girl, I can’t imagine a place where young teenage girls are given to older men to marry, generally without consent, and often times forced through emotional and (at times) physical abuse. Where special-needs infants are killed and where children who strike out on their own disappear.
14-year old Kyra was ‘chosen’ to wed her own father’s eldest brother (a 65 year old with six wives) by the ruthless Prophet Childs. One can’t help but feel for Kyra and the other teens and women living on the compound. Ms. Williams guides the reader through Kyra’s discovery of and burgeoning desire to have a normal life with the boy she loves.
The story does have its fair share of violence as verbal abuse, either implied or described. Kyra and her boyfriend were the victims of physical beatings and latent and passive violence is weaved throughout the entire story.
Although I really enjoyed The Chosen One, and had a hard time putting it down, this book did leave me with several unanswered questions. For instance, what happened to Josh, the Mobile Library driver? How about the compound? Was Prophet Childs captured/arrested? What about the goon squad? I’m not sure Ms. Williams has plans to tie up these loose ends with a sequel, as it has been three years since the release of this book.
My Rating
