“The School for Good and Evil” author Soman Chainani has moved on from fairy tales to radical politics with the Tuesday release of his debut YA novel, “Young World,” from Penguin Random House.
Told through diary entries interspersed with over 150 neon-orange visuals, “Young World” is described as a geopolitical thriller that follows an average teenager that becomes president of the United States in a not-so-distant future.
“I had been doing fairy tales for a long time, and that was kind of my revolt against Disney, in some ways, because I’d grown up on Disney fairy tales and never quite found myself in them,” Chainani told Variety. “So I think there was this feeling of wanting to redo my childhood and I thought that’s what I would be doing for the rest of my life, just because the series had taken off and I was being pigeonholed as the fairy tale guy.”
Following the launch of Netflix’s “The School for Good and Evil” movie adaptation in 2022, Chainani felt a “crescendo” and “ending” of that fairy-tale-content portion of his career.
“I had moved to St Louis to start a new relationship after 22 years in New York,” Chainani said. “And so everything was changing. And I started having visions of this color, and it was very bright. You have to kind of see it in real life. It was this, like, traffic-cone orange. And I was like, What is this? And it kept coming up, and I kept pulling out little swatches of it. And I started to have this thing of, I think this is a political party? Why am I thinking about a political party? And I started to come into this thing of, OK, you’re gonna have red for Republicans, blue for Democrats and nuclear orange for a third party. What’s the third party? And then boom, it hit me one day: it was young people. And I thought, OK, then you have a teen. Then immediately was like, teenage president. And what if the party isn’t just in America — it sweeps? And then you start having leaders of this revolting youth party all over the world. I was hit with a color first, and then from there came everything else.”
Per the official synopsis for “Young World,” “When average 17-year-old Benton Young goes viral for a video encouraging young voters to mess with a presidential election, he inadvertently sparks a global movement that sweeps him into the Oval Office—and causes more governments to fall, until eight of the world’s most powerful nations are led by teenagers. Faced with the monumental task of setting a new course for history, the young leaders convene at a summit in Sweden, but their unity is shattered when one of them is assassinated . . . and Benton is named the prime suspect. Hunted by enemies young and old, he must untangle a deadly web of secrets, betrayal, and power plays while the future of the world hangs in the balance. With globe-spanning action, stunning twists, and an electric new brand of storytelling, this heart-stopping renegade thriller explores what happens when the future really does belong to the young.”
Chainani was shopping the rights to adapt “Young World” for the screen when the novel was first announced in September 2024.
“The hook was so strong for the book that we had every producer you can imagine wanting the rights early on, when I had only written 50 pages of the book, and I was fine with that,” Chainani said. “I was kind of excited to work with someone from the ground up, and I was talking to all these amazing people, and we were even starting to go out to buyers, just with the hook and things like that. And then Trump won very early on, maybe two or three weeks after all of this started, and it was just, like, you felt the chill in terms of politics, everyone being scared of politics. And I felt like, let me pull the plug because the book’s not even done. It was two years from being done. So let’s just stop, and I’ll start over later, and let’s see what happens with the world.”
Chainani says he spent the next year finishing the book and is excited it’s releasing now at a time when “you can feel the youth revolt already starting.” He’s also restarted the adaptation conversation, telling Variety exclusively that he’s tapped political advisor and former Deputy White House Press Secretary for the Obama administration, Eric Schultz, as an executive producer on the TV series adaptation. Chainani asked Schultz, who has worked on multiple political-themed TV series and films, including HBO’s “Succession,” A24’s “Civil War,” and Netflix’s “The Diplomat,” to be part of the “Young World” adaptation from the earliest stages of the project, before the rights are sold to a studio or network.
“I just brought him in from the beginning to advise on what that would look like, how do we create the most real version of this?” the author said. “And to get somebody from the beginning, from the political side versus the kind of Hollywood side to help be the Jiminy Cricket conscience on how this is gonna look.”
Schultz said in a statement to Variety: “’Young World’ immediately struck me as an opportunity for adaptation—not just because of the thrilling story, bold visuals and global threads, but also for its potential to tap into the generational change driving so much of the conversation at home and around the world.”
