After wrapping up his bestselling School for Good and Evil series, Soman Chainani departs from fairy tales in the illustrated YA thriller Young World (Random House, May). Set in the near future, the story opens with a teenager posting a heartfelt video declaring that young people should have “the right to be young.” Seeing this as a campaign promise, a majority of American voters submit write-in votes for him in a presidential election, inspiring a worldwide movement of young adult leaders. —Nathalie op de Beeck

You’re known for reimagined fairy tales. Does Young World, with its wish fulfillment, qualify as a contemporary fairy tale?

This is a fantasy book, but the world is real—it’s ours. I finished it before this administration took office, and I find myself alarmed that all the plot points in the book are coming true. Every time I open the news, countries are decrying new imperialism, which is a big theme in the book. So it started as this fantasy of young people taking control of their future, and it’s turned into a manual for what actually needs to happen.

Your protagonist, Benton Young, is an ordinary guy who goes viral on social media and is elected POTUS. Why did you create an idealistic hero who’s out of his depth?

Early on, there was this debate among me, my editor, and everyone working on the book. Did we want a kid who was a Barack Obama—highly accomplished, an AP student, at the Model UN, and someone we’d all look up to? And every fiber of my being was like, no, we want an everyman, we want an everykid.

How did you bring this project to Random House?

When I finished 12 years of working on the School for Good and Evil for HarperCollins, I had become the fairy tale guy. It’s easy to stay in your lane, but that’s not what my brain would let me do. I started to think about this teenage president story that leads to eight countries run by teenagers, with Democrats blue, Republicans red, and nuclear orange for the third party, Revolting Youth. We took it to HarperCollins, but they were not receptive, so I immediately went to Phoebe Yeh, who was my editor on the first School for Good and Evil book before she moved to Random House.

All the action and the banter in Young World happens at a speedy clip. How did you achieve this pace?

My nature is to move more slowly, more lushly. Phoebe is a master of pace. She said with the first book in what is potentially a series, you have the capacity to create this fever-dream pace—you’re going to get more readers that way. I would speed it up, and then she’d come back and say, “I think it can go faster.” We did this over and over for the first 50 pages or so, and by then I understood the rhythm.

How did you develop the visual elements—memes, posters, news bulletins—between chapters?

I’d make a visual outline for each piece and give it to our three artists: one who’s very good at design, one who’s very good at illustration, and one who’s, like, a 23-year-old madman scientist who took on all the weirder, more difficult art. That combination of styles made the book feel more real, because you’ve got a grab bag of things. The art did such a good job of compressing time and moving us forward. It was the first time where I made a book that felt like a movie.

What do you hope readers take away from this wild ride?

When I give out the galley, kids come up to me and say, this book sounds like chaos—teenagers in charge. And I’m like, you’d be fine. Because at some point, you are the future leadership. That shift in power, I think, is coming sooner than we expect, and it might end up happening in this revolutionary way the book foretells.

Soman Chainani will appear at the evening author reception on Feb. 25.

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