LS 5623 The Chosen One

Williams, Carol Lynch. The Chosen One. St Martin’s Griffin: New York, 2009.

ISBN: 0-312-55511-3

Kyra Leigh Carlson is thirteen years old. She lives with her 19 brothers and sisters along with their Mothers: Mother Claire, Mother Victorian and her “true” Mother, Mother Sarah, and father, Richard. She lives among the Chosen Ones, a polygamist organization, whose Prophet Childs decrees that Kyra Will become the seventh wife of her 60 year-old Uncle Hyrum. Kyra is afraid her “sins” brought her to this situation: reading forbidden books, secretly visiting the Ironton County Mobile Library on Wheels, and having feelings for a boy the Prophet has not chosen for her. Something sparks inside Kyra after this revelation and prompts her to plot abandoning her way of life. She wonders if leaving all she knows behind will give her the freedom that she wants or destroy the family she already has.

Kyra’s voice in The Chosen One is powerful and clear. Her perspective of living in a world that most of us can’t even fathom is intriguing, exasperating, and at times makes you want to cry in empathy for Kyra. She wants to be free of the Chosen Ones and all the restrictions they entail, but at the same time is uneasy about the people in the outside world who are “From Satan.” She is also afraid for her Mother Sarah who is pregnant and sick again. She knows that the outside world has much to offer in the way of medical care for her mother from the forbidden books she reads. Her dissatisfaction from this situation is so palpable it makes the reader want to take her by the hand and lead her and her mother to a doctor for help, just to put Kyra at ease. She is afraid to voice her opinion. In a conversation with Mother Sarah, discussing the choices the Prophet has made for his people -- choices made by God through the Prophet -- Kyra thinks about what she wants to say her Mother: “But what do you think?”

This is a scary, tense story, a story of a life so different from “normal” that one cannot stop rushing through the pages until Kyra is either trapped in marriage to much older man or has run away to be free of the situation. Teens will be intrigued by Kyra’s perspective on the life she lives with her three Mothers, her father, and numerous siblings -- it is vastly different from “normal.” The love she feels for her family and the distress she feels at being chaffed by her lifestyle are many of the same emotions that teens feel and it makes Kyra’s plight all the more poignant in the final chapters of the story, as the May/June 2009 issue of The Horn Book states “within a fast-moving story, Williams creates sympathetic characters, and readers will hold their breath right to the end, hoping that Kyra wins her freedom.”