---
title: "The Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth"
description: "Summary: Ten years after five chosen teens work together to defeat a magical enemy, they come back together to face a new enemy. A last year, I stumbled on When Among Crows by Veronica Roth and then I..."
url: https://bookwi.se/the-chosen-ones-by-veronica-roth/
date: 2026-08-31
modified: 2026-08-31
author: "Adam Shields"
categories: ["Book Reviews"]
type: post
lang: en
---

# The Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

[![The Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth cover image](https://bookwi.se/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/52486678-199x300.jpg)](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07SZBG91K/)**Summary: Ten years after five chosen teens work together to defeat a magical enemy, they come back together to face a new enemy.**

A last year, I stumbled on [When Among Crows by Veronica Roth](https://bookwi.se/when-among-crows/) and then I read the second of that series [To Clutch a Razor](https://bookwi.se/to-clutch-a-razor-by-veronica-roth-curse-bearer-2/). I had not read any of Roth’s books in a decade, but she has been writing, so I decided I would pick up some of her books when I ran across them on sale.

The Chosen Ones has a premise that I was interested in. A group of “chosen ones” was found as early teens after magic started happening and an enemy arose. That story is the backstory to this book but flashbacks do tell us part of that story.

This book is about those heroes as the most famous people on earth and how they have adapted to that, or not. The story primarily focuses on Sloane. She is dating Matt, the team’s leader, but she has not recovered from the trauma of that original fight. It is this part of the book that I liked the most. I wanted to understand what it was like to grapple with regret for what you had done, while the world treats you as a hero. I didn’t really want the book to only stay there, but that was where I liked the book most.

I am not going to spoil the story, but I can understand why a number of people didn’t like the book, or at least thought it was mediocre. The story was a little slow and it meandered around a bit. I liked the book and I have appreciated the grappling with the emotional and other costs of being a hero. It felt to me like [While the World Watched,](https://bookwi.se/while-the-world-watched/) which was the memoir of the last girl to leave the bathroom before the bomb went off that killed the four girls in the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham in 1963. She grappled with the cost that she and those around her paid for participating in the civil rights movement. Her brother clearly had PTSD and died young. She grappled with alcoholism and nearly divorced before moving back to Birmingham and working with the museum before she retired.

The Chosen Ones is obviously fantasy, but I do think as fiction it does try to grapple with the ways that there is often a cost to doing good that we don’t grapple with in advance. Mostly because we are not making choices in advance to do good, but merely responding to an immediate need. There is a twist in [Project Hail Mary](https://bookwi.se/project-hail-mary/) about Grace’s courage or lack of it and the way that he redeems himself because he has someone that he really loves that drives him to be courageous. There is an overlapping but different story here that I think complements that one. Project Hail Mary is a very optimistic story, which is part of why people like it. Chosen Ones is a far less optimistic story, which I think is part of why people like it less. But I think both are stories that need to be told.

Mental health and trauma are important and I am glad that fiction is picking up on that more over the past couple of decades. There is issues with turning real categories of psychology into “pop” usage and culturally adapting it in ways that are unhelpful. (I haven’t read it yet, but [ Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond by Matthew Loftus](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1514012685/) is about this.)

This is an adult oriented book in the sense that there is language and violence and trauma and some off screen sex, but most in the sense that it is about emotional and psychologically adult issues. The book is about now adults who were once early teens who were “chosen ones.” The Divergent/Harry Potter/Hunger Games characters didn’t stay teens. They grew up. And when they grew up, they likely would have had to grapple with their lost childhood and what they had to do. This is one version of that story.

**The Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth Purchase Links: [Paperback](https://www.amazon.com/Chosen-Ones-best-selling-author-Veronica/dp/0358164087/), [Kindle Edition](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07SZBG91K/), **[**Audible.com Audiobook**](https://www.amazon.com/Chosen-Ones/dp/B084RL6ZDV/)