Book Review: Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

Title: Legendborn
Author: Tracy Deonn
Rating: FIVE AMAZING STARS!

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Click to see my Legendborn mood board and 15 Thoughts I had while reading!

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU @HEAROURVOICESTOURS FOR GIVING ME THE CHANCE TO READ THIS BOOK, AND BE A PART OF THE BOOK TOUR. I got my e-ARC from Simon and Schuster Children’s Publishing via Netgalley for my participation of the Legendborn book tour, and it’s my stop today!

I’d wanted to read this book since I saw it featured in a Netgalley article. It has SUCH a beautiful cover *BLACK GIRL MAGIC* and the story is everything! It’s full of so many amazing elements. It’s deeply emotional and touches on so many deeply triggering topics! I love the characterization, world building, storytelling, romance, and every single thing about this book.

BLACK GIRL MAGIC: Bree, the main character, is EVERYTHING! I find myself falling in love with female protagonists in the YA Fantasies I’ve read this year, and I can see why. They’re so well written and so fleshed out. Bree is no exception. I want to wrap Bree up in the warmest hug and give her satin pillows to rest her weary head on. My good sis went through it in this book, and I loved how she dealt with her issues and her resilience. She had her struggles and her guilt and her regrets and her moments of self doubt, but she became so much better for everything she went through! I also love how much of Bree’s hair and hair care was talked about in this book. Wash day, the need for satin scarves, a “don’t touch my hair” moment, GIVE ME ALL OF THAT!

The World Building: In Legendborn, Tracy Deonn retells the Arthurian legend with a modern (and historic) twist, tying it all the way to slave trade and racism. There’s a *very complicated* magic and hierarchy system, and it was hard to get used to the different words and terms for each person, rank, and creature. Once I got into the flow of things, it was smooth sailing from there! There are different forces at war in this book, and different spheres of magical worlds that collide over the course of the book.

The Romance: Ouuuu, the romance in this book was so beautifully written and even though I always roll my eyes at the golden boy – heroine – bad boy triangle, I actually love how subtle it was in this book, and how it was pronounced without really being defined.

Bestie goals: At the beginning of the book, I was majorly side eyeing Bree because it seemed like she totally abandoned her childhood bestie because of her quest. As things played out and she found her way back to Alice, their friendship became one of my favorite things about the book! That one scene where Alice thought Bree had been molested, and she said “I’ll believe you”. My heart. 💕

LGBTQIA+ Rep: This book has an impressive amount of LGBTQIA+ representation, and I really loved it. There was a bisexual primary character, a nonbinary character, and a sapphic couple! These weren’t just token characters, as their relationships and identities were written beautifully into the book!

Genealogy: Genealogy and ancestry played a huge part in this book, and tracing family trees was also a very important part of the book’s magic. While there were white characters and families who could trace their lineage back to the sixth century, Bree couldn’t trace her ancestry back three generations. The same can be said for a lot of Black families affected by slavery.

Some important issues discussed by the author in this book are racism and sexism, and very often, these two themes intertwined. Bree had to deal with a lot of racist bs from her Dean at uni and even the police, and female Legendborn are often undermined by Shadowborn and fellow members of the order. The entire concept of The Order of the Rose is also a load of sexist bs, and I’m glad that in present day, there are female Scoins being Called by their knights.

Slavery, ownership of slaves, and the maltreatment of these slaves was also explored by Deonn, and some of these parts were really really hard to read – rape, whippings, and mass unmarked graves.

I’m so so glad I got the chance to read this book. I’m gonna take several moments to stew in this book, cause the final chapters took me tf out, but I need book two YESTERDAY. 

Blurb

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.