'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.'
Legendborn follows Bree, a sixteen-year-old girl that's left home to go off to college as part of an early placement scheme. She's recently been through the loss of her mother, and the break away from home and a chance to dive into school is something that she feels she needs to help get through the trauma. However, she soon discovers more than she was expecting on the campus. After witnessing a group of students using magic to fight a demon, she discovers that there's a whole unknown world out there, and one that she's immediately drawn to.
When she realises that this group has tried to erase her memories of the incident from her mind she wants to find out how that's possible, especially when it begins to unlock memories of the night her mother died, of the first time she came across magic. Desperate to learn more, she tries to infiltrate a secret society on campus with the help of Nick, her student mentor who also happens to be a member of this group, though one who doesn't want any part of it anymore. The two of them decide to try to find answers, however, and to see if there was more than meets the eye to the death of Bree's mother.
At first glance there's not much that jumps out to make Legendborn too different from other YA Urban Fantasy books, it has a female protagonist who discovers a world of monsters and magic, she learns that there's a secret group dedicated to protecting regular people from monsters, the lead falls for the hot guy who's part of this society. But that's ignoring something really big that makes Legendborn stand out not only as something different, but something really important. It's lead character, Bree.
Bree, unlike a lot of other YA protagonists, is Black. Now, I'm sure there will be some people who will immediately jump in to say that this shouldn't make a difference, that the colour of her skin shouldn't impact a story like this. But that's not really true, because let's all be honest, the colour of someone's skin makes a hell of a difference to their life experience, especially in the US. Within the first few chapters we see this, when Bree is pulled into the back of a police car when all the white students are allowed to walk away. We see her being at college because of her academic excellence being disbelieved, with people thinking she somehow cheated her way in as 'affirmative action', and we see her worried that if she says or does the wrong thing she could end up as another young Black person dead at the hands of a cop.
I honestly can't think of another YA book where the lead has to deal with this kind of thing. All the other teen girl leads who sneak out of their house late at night only have to worry about getting in trouble with their parents, not worried about being murdered by police. White protagonists who have run-ins with the law usually get off with a warning or a stern talking to, Bree is in danger of never seeing her family again. This added pressure and danger makes Bree such a strong and amazing young woman before she even comes across anything unusual in the book. She, like so many Black people in the US, has to live under unimaginable pressure and a sense of danger, and it makes her so fucking strong.
Race plays into the book in other ways too. Instead of just being seen as an outsider by others trying to become accepted into the Order of the Round Table because she's new to this world of magic and monsters, she's looked down on my people because she's Black. Other initiates look at her presence in the competition as being down to her sleeping her way in, or tricking Nick in some way, not because she deserves it. In one scene one of the older white women assumes she's a member of staff and talks to her like dirt, simply because she's Black. And there's a moment later on in the book which I won't spoil too much, but Bree ends up on the receiving end of a torrent of racist abuse, because she dared to do something that no person of colour had done before.
These moments not only elevated Bree as a character, raising her up as an amazing example of a young female lead, but also challenged a lot of preconceptions I went into the book with. I was expecting the book to follow a lot of YA tropes and standard plot formula, and it does in places, but whenever these moments were challenged because of Bree's race it threw me off. These moments stopped me from becoming complacent and reminded me that there was something extra special here.
Legendborn also spends some time addressing colonialism, and the slave trade, both in very real and fantastical ways. Where other Urban Fantasy books with European centric mythologies will ignore other cultural ideas this book doesn't. It shows the readers that the ways of the Order of the Round Table aren't the only way, that other cultures have different understandings of, and connections to, magics. It addresses the fact that white people tore cultures apart in their attempt to bring them into their way of thinking, how it destroyed entire cultures and ways of life in order to stamp out practices and beliefs they considered evil. Yes, here it's talking about ways of using magic, but its something that happened in the real world, and has very real consequences that are felt even to this day.
Tracy Deonn does such a good job at intertwining important discussions on race into what you'd come to expect from a YA book. I honestly couldn't see this book working half as well without those elements, and am so eager to see what happens next in the story not to find out what evil plots the villains will come up with, or to see what new magic and adventures will happen, but to see how Bree will challenge this white centric group and their racist views. So much happens towards the end of the book that sets up for some amazing stuff to come, and I can't wait to see how it plays out.
Legendborn was so much better than I was expecting, it has more heart and more depth than other books in this genre. It has a hero who feels so much more realised than others like her, and who's engaging as a person. Other books could benefit from being more like Legendborn, and I can see this easily topping bestseller lists and being talked about in excited tones for years to come.
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