*This book was provided as a physical galley from a San Diego Comic Con giveaway in exchange for an honest review.
Goodreads Synopsis:
Filled with mystery and an intriguingly rich magic system, Tracy Deonn’s YA contemporary fantasy Legendborn offers the dark allure of City of Bones with a modern-day twist on a classic legend and a lot of Southern Black Girl Magic.
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.
My Review:
Legendborn drew me in from the very beginning. Deonn’s writing from the prologue wove an intricate tapestry depicting Bree’s grief and regret at the death of her mother. The loss Bree feels is a big part of the story and she even perceives that part of herself to be a different person than “Before-Bree”, but it doesn’t make her anything less. Her drive to find out everything she could about her mother’s death made her even more powerful, in mind and body.
I definitely appreciated Bree’s unique goals. She didn’t care for tradition, especially ones like those of the Legendborn, who rejected her at almost every turn because of her race and gender. Bree obviously resented this, and her main purpose for trying to join the Legendborn was to find out what she needed to know and then watch their organization topple, and her motives were very understandable.
I was hesitant about the concept of Arthurian legend, mainly because I only know about it what I’ve heard in retellings (which wasn’t much), but I loved what was done. Tracy Deonn used the rules of the legends to build a world that even those who have no prior knowledge, like me, could understand. I always appreciate a character who’s also a newbie who can learn about the world along with the reader! I was confused at first, but I actually understood almost all of what Deonn was saying by the end of it.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5!
The Fiction Feature 