Feb 19

Feb 19 Legendborn (The Legendborn Cycle, #1)

Author: Tracy Deonn
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus.

A flying demon feeding on human energies.

A secret society of so called “Legendborn” students that hunt the creatures down.

And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a “Merlin” and who attempts—and fails—to wipe Bree’s memory of everything she saw.

The mage’s failure unlocks Bree’s own unique magic and a buried memory with a hidden connection: the night her mother died, another Merlin was at the hospital. Now that Bree knows there’s more to her mother’s death than what’s on the police report, she’ll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, even if that means infiltrating the Legendborn as one of their initiates.

She recruits Nick, a self-exiled Legendborn with his own grudge against the group, and their reluctant partnership pulls them deeper into the society’s secrets—and closer to each other. But when the Legendborn reveal themselves as the descendants of King Arthur’s knights and explain that a magical war is coming, Bree has to decide how far she’ll go for the truth and whether she should use her magic to take the society down—or join the fight.

TL;DR Review

Legendborn was everything I could ask for in a YA low fantasy novel — a top-notch magic system, lots of layers, a strong central mystery, and swoony characters. I loved it.

For you if: You want to get absorbed into a gripping new adventure.

Full Review

“From buried lives to beaten ones. From blood stolen to blood hidden. I map this terrain's sins, the invisible, and the many, and hold them close. Because even if the pain of those sins takes my breath away, the pain feels like belonging. And ignoring it, after all I've just witnessed, would be loss.”

Legendborn is one of those books where so many people loved when it first came out, I just KNEW I was going to regret having waited so long to finally pick it up. And yet I did wait. And here we are. Because yes, this book is as good as it’s hyped up to be.

It’s about a 16-year-old girl named Bree who enrolls at UNC Chapel Hill for their Early College program shortly after her mother died in a car accident. But from her first night on campus, she finds herself increasingly tangled in a secret society dating back to the time of King Arthur, although of course nothing is quite as it seems. At the same time, she begins to learn more about her mother, and her own family legacy, and how colonialism, violence, and ancestry connect them in surprising ways. And, of course there’s a boy. Maybe two boys.

This book is just so, so well written. The magic system is voluptuously imagined, and the worldbuilding is perfectly paced. The central mystery is compelling and layered and gets more and more intriguing the more you read. Bree’s grief over her mother’s death is nuanced and massive and heartbreaking. And the main characters! The relationships between them! Just so good.

And then on top of all that, Deonn tips this book from “really good” into “great” with the way she weaves in so much heart and wisdom and history and grief on the ongoing legacy of enslavement in the South, what it’s like to be a Black woman in a world built by and for enslavers, and how it feels to take up the mantle of strength and resistance that one’s ancestors were forced to build.

Brb, preordering book two (out in November).