Next weekend I’ll be drafting for my Fantasy Football team. I’m sure most of you are aware of what it is, but for those who are not, basically it’s a game of statistics played during the NFL season where participants “draft” real-life players from various teams for their virtual team, and their performance in their real-life games translates to the stats of your team. I’m not super into football, but my friends were doing a league last year so I thought, “What the heck?”, and now I am doing it once again. Go Deep Space Niners! (That would be my team… named after the baseball team formed by the crew of Deep Space Nine in a season seven episode. I am a geek. By the way, don’t watch anything from season seven of Deep Space Nine before having watched the previous seasons. It’s chock full of character and plot spoilers.)
OK, how does this tie into Young Adult literature? Well, I thought it would be fun to create a “fantasy” young adult book, built by various characters and plot devices from different YA books. The books I decided to draw from:
Setting: Post -Apocalyptic Chicago divided into factions (Divergent)
Main Character: Elliot North (For Darkness Shows the Stars)
The Best Friend: Harley (Across the Universe)
The Love Interest: Prince Kai (Cinder)
The Antagonist: President Snow (The Hunger Games)
Plot Set-Up: Reality show where the Princes chooses his wife (The Selection)
Book Synopsis: Elliot North is persuaded by her father and her crazy best friend Harley (BTW, no love triangle here- Harley loved Elliot’s sister before she tragically died) to sign up for the selection, a lottery-style opportunity to compete for the Prince’s love for the entire country to see. Elliot finds the idea ridiculous, but signs up with the full confidence that she has a better chance of being selected for the show.
Yet as her unfortunate luck would have it, Elliot is selected, and is whisked away to downtown Chicago to meet the Prince… and the girls she is supposed to be competing against. She decides to try to enjoy the food and the pretty dresses until Prince Kai decides to kick her out, which she believes will be by her second day there, and is surprised when he actually seems to like her, despite her bluntness with him about her lack of care about him.
Elliot and Kai form an unlikely friendship, which leads to him allowing her to see her friend Harley when he comes to visit, and the two of them taking frequent walks down Navy Pier to watch the boats. Kai learns from Elliot just how bad things are among the different factions that are supposed to be united, but are anything but. Elliot learns from Kai that war is imminent with the neighboring country that used to be part of the same country as theirs before a civil war broke it apart, and that the other country’s President Snow seems eager to engage the forces.
Will Elliot come to care for Kai? Will President Snow make good on his threats? Will Harley’s new job at The Royal House affect Kai and Elliot’s relationship or even endanger his hopes of being an artist? It’s a trilogy of course, so it’ll be a while before you find all this out.
This isn’t actually my ideal YA book, but I still thought it was fun to construct elements from different stories and see how they would fit together.
What do you think? What elements would include for your “fantasy” book team?
Haha, very interesting! I like this idea. Of course, I’d be somewhat limited with the books I could choose just because my memory is always so bad… If I were to do something like this, I’d want to flip things to the dark side. Like, somehow make the MC a evil female villain (for some reason none are coming to my mind right now) and the love interest be the Darkling (Shadow and Bone), with the antagonist being a good guy (Harry Potter?). Just because I love me some evil 😉
Interesting twist! That’d be fun!
Okay, since I didn’t really like The Selection, I don’t like this idea. Sorry.
I’d rather if you took the plot of Hunger games, and you put all the characters you hated or the wimpy ones into that plot. Or the funny people. We can call it the Comedian-Killing Games.
The Selection is actually my least favorite plot among these books but it seemed the easiest for me to work with. But I like your idea of doing The Hunger Games but completely changing up the kind of people in it!
Hey, I’d read that book! I wasn’t too sure about Prince Kai being the love interest (I mean, I like him, but I don’t really know enough about him to find him dreamy), but his spot in the synopsis makes a lot of sense. 😀
Yeah, I was just trying to fit things together the best I could and I thought Prince Kai would work well with this particular plot.
I love this idea! And the questions and “It’s a trilogy of course, so it’ll be a while before you find all this out.” are fantastic! I have no idea what I’d choose!
Because seriously, every YA book is a start of a new trilogy!
Who wouldn’t want President Snow as the antagonist? He’s most ideal for this generations worst fiend haha
– Krys
He’s a great antagonist.
This was cute post XD I would totally buy your book, you know. HAHA!
Ha, thanks!
Hello, I stumbled across this and thought ‘Hey, there’s an interesting idea’, so I’ve posted my own with a few changes and linked to this post – I hope you don’t mind 🙂
Not at all; glad you enjoyed it!
Oh, I really enjoyed The Selection (as well as The Elite), TGH and Divergent, and just finished Cinder (though I can’t say I’m in love with with Prince Kai…) so I’d totally go for a mash up like this 🙂
Aw, I think Prince Kai is great! I wouldn’t say he’s my favorite love interest ever but I like him a lot.