The Chosen by Taran MatharuMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Taran Matharu's told a pretty great story in his Summoner series, and now, he returns with a whole new kind of fantasy, one that, in my head, harks back to a lot of British YA novels from around ten years ago or so. Like, for instance, the TimeRiders or Escape from Furnace series. And also some of the most iconic YA stories like The Maze Runner or The Hunger Games. Or some truly otherworldly adventures like Predators or Land of the Lost or Codex Alera.
Yes, Matharu's a master of the mashup, and the start of his latest trilogy combines sci-fi and fantasy in a high-stakes, unstoppably thrilling package. Also like the Summoner series, Matharu uses this story to shine some light on social ills constantly plaguing our world - namely, racism (made especially apparent because protagonist Cade is biracial Indian and Anglo and has to deal with a lot of this kind of shit in the real world) and classism and associated bullying. But when so many of Cade's always-at-war classmates are forced to fight a mysterious game with mysterious rules on a mysterious planet, they truly have to become brothers in arms, because united we stand, divided we fall.
It's not just the boys from Cade's school that are in this world either. It's not even people from the same time period. Or places. Or creatures. Mesoamerican ruins, lost Roman legionnaires, dinosaurs, and a sometimes maddeningly unhelpful digital-assistant Codex populate this world, along with these boarding-school boys, a group of English girls from the 80s (I could almost see them being part of a side story in the greater Stranger Things 'verse), and Quintus, a deaf Roman with some serious survival skills.
And as is usual for one of Matharu's books, it all builds up to a nasty cliffhanger that answers some questions and totally blows the door wide open for the rest of the story to stun us in the next couple of years.
I'll just let Thomas say it, as he says it best:
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