When my good friend Phoebe started telling me about her latest editing project, I leaned forward in my chair. “Young World,” by the author of the School of Good and Evil series, revolves around a high school kid who stumbles into the presidency after instigating a youth revolt against older politicians unable or unwilling to fix problems enveloping us. As she spoke, visions of Zohran Mamdani, the youngest New York City mayor in more than a century, danced in my head. “Could you send me an advance copy?,” I queried. (More on the current occupant of Gracie Mansion later.)
Thankfully, she did, and I dove right into “Young World,” marveling at how Soman Chainani captured the zeitgeist in a geopolitical thriller that manages to be exceedingly topical while also heartfelt: Readers never lose sight of the teen preoccupations bedeviling the narrator, a 17-year-old who lives with his basketball coach father in St. Louis before his fateful victory and has a strained relationship with his mother, now remarried, along with a secret crush his pals deplore.
Arctic trouble
Benton Young is still getting his bearings at the White House when Sweden’s prime minister, one of 12 Revolting Youth leaders installed around the globe following the American election, calls a G-8 gathering to discuss the future of Dragontail, a fictional Arctic island rich with oils and metals that various countries are vying to exploit. If this scenario makes you think of Greenland, the Arctic country Donald Trump keeps threatening to annex, well, there’s good reason for that. The tussles over Dragontail expand to include India and China and power the remainder of neon-orange infused novel, which is interspersed with faux government documents, news articles, social media soundbites and illustrations.
How did he do it?
Given how tricky it can be to stay ahead of current events for longer lead projects, be they books, TV shows or movies, “Young World” seems remarkably prescient. So how did Chainani do it? The answers lie in his weekly Diary of a Novel entries.
The author launched the Sustack initiative one year into writing “Young World,” pulling back the curtain on his creative process and personal life during the more than two-year lead-up to the book’s publication. Nowadays, he shares a lot of anecdotes about life on a Missouri farm with his partner, but Chainani came up with the basic premise for “Young World” while still living in New York City, dismissing it then as too difficult and outside his wheelhouse to tackle himself.
“I just knew in my gut that it would make an absolutely mind-boggling novel or movie or television show,” Chainani writes in his first entry, describing efforts to convince others to take the idea and run with it. “I just couldn’t be the one to do it.” Then, after finishing his School of Good and Evil fantasy series — six books and two prequels — he sat down to write another fairy tale book series he had been imagining, only to hammer out the first chapter in the book that would become “Young World.”
Mamdani connection
Moving to St. Louis for his then-new relationship further helped give him insight about the alienated youth that would help propel Trump to his second presidency and Mamdani to Gracie Mansion a year later. In a twist of fate, Chainani first met the future mayor while serving as an assistant to his filmmaker mother, Mira Nair, while waitlisted for Columbia Film School; Mamdani was then a mere 12 years old. After the relatively untested politician triumphed over former governor Andrew Cuomo in the primary last June, Chainani predicted similar victories ahead.
Once the author committed to his teen president premise, he needed to come up with a global conflict that might still be relevant when readers got their hands on the finished book several years later. He found his Arctic answer when a Washington University professor and a colleague both referenced potential border disputes in that region during a two-day period.
Years later, a screenwriter who had worked in the White House asked Chainani why he had picked the Arctic. “I have no clue,” Chainani confesses in diary entry published after Trump’s second inauguration. “It certainly wasn’t conscious.”
Instead, like a fisherman waiting on a calm, empty sea, he felt a tug on the line — and trusted his creative instinct. He and his colleague Jun discussed using the actual country of Greenland in the novel, but Chainani moved forward with a fictional option instead.
“There are many things like this in ‘Young World’ — stories and characters and twists I settled on years ago that are starting to pop up now,” he explains. “None of which I take credit for. Instead, I’m starting to understand the power of our unconscious processes to see what’s actually happening under the surface of things, rather than what we think is happening.”
Trumpian delay
Chainani was affected by our Disrupter in Chief in one way, however. The former filmmaker had begun shopping TV and film rights for the book shortly before the 2024 election and noticed an immediate reluctance to engage with political material after Trump won, so stopped those conversations until he finished the book. Chainani has since restarted the adaptation conversation, Variety reported in a story coinciding with the book’s publication.
I delayed writing this until I could re-read “Young World” in print, rather than digital form. Although I’ve gotten used to reading books in digital formats, “Young World” really benefits from a tactile reading experience. Digital screens can’t do justice to the neon orange on the cover or throughout the 480-page book, just as the author fretted in his diaries.
One teensy advisory: I clutched my oldster pearls at the strong language in Benton’s diary entries, but that may say more about my lack of familiarity with YA books these days than anything else.
“Young World” by Soman Chainani, Random House, 480 pages, $22
Originally published on my Lititude substack.