Charlotte Kersten

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.

Review

Legendborn elevates a lot of classic YA tropes that we’ve come to know and love (sometimes) from series like Shadowhunters – we follow a teenage girl who realizes that she belongs in a magical world that is hiding within our own world and has to fight monsters while coming into her own power and (maybe) being caught in a love triangle between a nice boy and an edgy one. The elevation comes from 1) generally strong writing 2) generally strong characters and relationships and 3) the exploration of identity, power, and racism that comes along with the main character being a Black girl in South Carolina as well as the Chosen One.

That last point features some of my favorite parts of the book, such as Bree learning about her powers by using Root magic to memory-jump into her ancestors’ experiences and gaining their shared wisdom through generations of survival. I always love memory-based magic like this, and it’s especially effective here. The existence of Root magic demonstrates really well that other forms and interpretations of power and knowledge exist beyond those hegemonic ones that are often accepted as the norm, and Bree has to try to reconcile the information she is learning from different groups and how far she wants to go to accomplish what is important to her in her grief and trauma. In addition, Legendborn is really smart in how it interrogates a lot of fantasy staples like the the importance of bloodlines/inheritance/lineage with Bree’s awareness of the privilege around her and the ultimate reveal that she is King Arthur’s Scion because of the sexual violence that occurred while her ancestors were enslaved by Arthur’s descendants.

I only have a couple of criticisms. For one thing, Bree’s best friend Alice felt like an afterthought throughout a lot of the story, even beyond the normal extent of the main character having to hide her secret life from people in her life without magical powers. I hope that her relationship with Alice is given a little bit more space moving forward. There are also a lot of paragraphs of Heavy Exposition with Capitalized World-Building Words that I think could have been trimmed down. Similarly, there are a LOT of Squire and Scion characters who are introduced at the same time and are hard to keep track of because of their scant characterization, even the ones who last through the trials and play slightly more important roles in the final parts of the story.

That being said, this is a book that knows exactly what it’s doing as YA fantasy and does it really well. I will read on soon!