Lu rushed back to her dorm, put together a portfolio and applied. I remember standing there and thinking this was the coolest job I’d ever heard of.” “It was a very strange, sudden, serendipitous moment. To Lu, a keen gamer and part-time artist, it seemed almost too good to be true. It was a recruitment ad seeking eight interns to create new video game ideas for Disney Interactive Studios. “In smaller letters below, it said, ‘Do You Like To Draw?’” “In big, bold letters were the words, ‘Do You Like to Play Video Games?’” she recalled. Then, a notice posted on a campus bulletin board stopped her in her tracks. “I remember walking around campus feeling down and out of sorts because I knew I didn’t really want to go into medicine or law but I didn’t know what else I could do,” Lu said. However, as graduation approached, she felt more and more unsure about her ambitions. Marie Lu’s latest novel, the final volume of her The Young Elites trilogy, was published earlier this month. Instead, she planned on becoming a doctor or lawyer and pursued a degree in political science at USC Dornsife while also taking classes in biological science. Lu is one of the young adult genre’s biggest stars, but her path to success wasn’t straightforward.įirst, although she loved writing and had written stories since she was a small child in China, Lu didn’t consider writing to be a viable career option. “It’s not a perspective that gets tackled a lot, even if many of our favorite characters tend to be villains,” she said. Lu was immediately intrigued by the idea of writing from the villain’s point of view. However, her original, clean-cut, Clark Kent-style hero failed to meet the approval of her agent, who advised Lu to ditch the hero and concentrate instead on Adelina. Interestingly, Lu didn’t start out with a villainous protagonist. “ The Midnight Star explores Adelina’s downfall into darkness, why she chooses to become a villain and whether - once someone falls - it’s possible to find redemption,” she explained. “The trilogy is a twist on the superpower genre because the novels are written from the perspective of a villain instead of a hero,” Lu said, referring to her antihero, Adelina, whom she describes as “essentially the teen girl version of Darth Vader. Set in a dystopian fantasy world, the novel is Lu’s sixth overall and the third and final installment in her current young adult fantasy series, The Young Elites. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 2016), was published earlier this month. Her eagerly awaited new novel, The Midnight Star (G.P. Lauded by critics as “a hit factory,” alumna and New York Times best-selling novelist Marie Lu ’06 is an established star of young adult fiction.