Eight top chosen one YA fantasy books

Leah Rachel von Essen is an editor, writer, and book reviewer. She is a copyeditor and fact-checker at Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as a contributing editor, Adult Books, for American Library Association’s magazine Booklist. She writes regularly for Chicago Review of Books and is a senior contributor at Book Riot.

At Book Riot she tagged eight "chosen one YA novels [that] paint fantastic and compelling worlds for our protagonists to work their way through on their hero journeys." One title on the list:

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

Scholomance is a school for people with magic to learn how to use it. Ever-shifting and incredibly dangerous, the school operates on an unusual model: at the end of your fourth year, either you survive the rush of monsters and dark forces and graduate, or you die. El is unlikable and grating, and she has an incredibly dark gift, based in curses, so she isn’t exactly popular among her classmates. But slowly, she and unexpected ally, golden-boy Orion, start to realize that there’s a way to fix what’s broken in Scholomance—and they might have to do it, for anyone at the school to have a fighting chance.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue