Legendborn by Tracy Deonn
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 on 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.
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This book was one of the most amazing YA fantasies. It was such an elaborate story with excitement, adventure, and amazing characters. Character driven stories are my absolute favourite so this one hit my top 10 list this year for sure. This book takes place from Bree’s point of view and follows her through grief and healing, and through changing relationships and new school settings. It had a major “magic school” feeling even though it takes place in our world and not a fantasy one (although there are definitely a lot of fantasy elements in this). The magic system was very elaborate and was pulled from a couple of different sources which I really enjoyed. The ancestral part of this book was very fascinating and I liked how the author tied back “power” to one’s own ancestry. The lore behind everything was one of the best parts of the book. I’m an absolute sucker for legends and we don’t get many books about King Arthur or his knights so this was an amazing treat and the portrayal was flawless.
Bree is a teenager who has just lost her mother in a tragic accident. In the aftermath, she enters a school her mother never wanted her to go to and finds herself catapulted into a world full of danger and magic. She also finds out why her mother had such reservations about this school and is surprised to find how much her own family’s history is involved in everything new and strange that is happening in her life. When she finds out about the secret society that keeps our world safe from demons, she knows immediately that they have something to do with what happened to her mother because she recognizes the magic that surrounds them. The whole secret society plot is what originally hooked me. I love university/campus type settings with secret societies because you just know that if a society is involved something big is about to go down, and it won’t be good. It also adds so much mystery and intrigue to it that a lot of people loved. I think most people who attended some sort of campus setting always wished they could be a part of something like that. (I’m still not convinced that the tunnels under my Uni didn’t have some weird clubs associated with them).
The absolute best part of this book, the part that connected me to it on a much deeper level, was how the author dealt with grief and trauma. The portrayal of Bree’s experiences and loss were extremely relatable. You can tell that the author was drawing on real experiences by how accurate the descriptions of despair were. There were times I had to stop reading because it felt too real and too raw but then you get to Bree’s healing journey and it was so beautiful to see. Death’s portrayals in a lot of YA novels skims over the ugly bits, the parts where you don’t know how to survive in this new world without that person, the parts where depression’s fingers creep slowly over the happiest parts of your life, the parts where it becomes so hard to fight for normalcy. I think a lot of times we get frustrated with characters that seem to just “give up” but with Bree, we got to delve deep into how she’s feeling and why and the energy it takes to fight through it all.
This was probably the most fun I’ve had reading a new fantasy series in a long time. I’ve read a lot of great ones this year that pulled me into their amazing worlds but this book just had that addictive “binge it until you’re done, stay up all night, remember all the locations where you read it” quality to it and I missed that feeling. I loved the writing style, I loved the characters, I loved the mythology, I loved the magic system. I’d be hard pressed to find anything about this book that I didn’t like. In my opinion, this series will go down as one of those must-read fantasy series like Percy Jackson and Narnia.
Obviously this one comes highly recommended by me. If you like fantasy there is no doubt in my mind that you will love this book just as much as I did. 5 out of 5 stars.