Our Score4.4/ 5
EDITION PUBLISHEDSeptember 2020
Themes
Grief and inheritanceRace, legacy, and who gets written into historySelf-discovery and reclaiming power
Legendborn
Tracy Deonn's Legendborn takes the King Arthur legend and roots it in the American South, following a grieving Black teenager who stumbles into a secret society of knights' descendants. It's a contemporary YA fantasy where the hunt for the truth about a dead mother and the discovery of a buried power turn out to be the same quest.
The Review
Our take
Bree Matthews is the kind of narrator who carries a whole book, and she very nearly does. When we meet her, her mother has just died, and Deonn writes that grief not as a single wound but as a fog that distorts everything Bree sees and touches. She's angry in a way the genre rarely lets its heroines be: sharp-tongued, self-protective, unwilling to be soothed. The best thing the novel does is refuse to separate her supernatural quest from her emotional one. The mystery of her mother's death and the discovery of her own power are the same thread, and Deonn keeps pulling it tight.
The premise sounds like a lot of moving parts, and it is. A residential program at UNC-Chapel Hill, a flying demon on the first night, a teenage Merlin who tries and fails to erase Bree's memory, a society of Legendborn descended from Arthur's knights. But Deonn earns the sprawl by setting two kinds of power against each other. There's the inherited, rule-bound world of the Legendborn, all bloodlines and ranked initiations, and then there are the older folk traditions tied to Bree's own family. Watching those traditions collide is, to my reading, where the book gets most interesting. The Round Table mythology becomes a vehicle for asking who gets to inherit a legacy and who gets erased from one.
This is also a campus novel that takes the South seriously as a setting rather than a backdrop. Deonn writes about wealth, lineage, and the long memory of place with a specificity that gives the fantasy real teeth. Bree, as a Black girl moving through spaces built to keep people like her out, notices what the secret society would rather she didn't. I read the book's anger as purposeful, and the way it threads American history through the structure of its magic struck me as its boldest move. That's my interpretation, but the text invites it.
The romance is a slow, prickly thing. Bree and Nick, the self-exiled Legendborn she recruits, circle each other warily, and Deonn lets attraction grow out of trust that's hard-won rather than instant sparks. It suits Bree's guardedness. The pacing builds toward a final stretch that recontextualizes much of what came before, and it lands with genuine weight.
Why you should read
- Readers who want a contemporary fantasy where grief is the emotional engine
- Fans of reimagined mythology grounded in real cultural history
- Anyone who loves a guarded, fierce, hard-to-win-over heroine
- Readers drawn to slow-burn, complicated romance
What to expect
- The worldbuilding is heavy up front, so readers wanting a quick, propulsive plot may find the early chapters slow
- This is the opening of a series and leans into setup, so don't expect a self-contained resolution
A couple of honest cautions. This is dense. The first third asks you to absorb a great deal of worldbuilding, terminology, and institutional rules before the emotional payoff fully clicks, and readers who want a lean, fast plot may feel the front end drag. The back half also leans hard on setup for what's clearly a series, so this story doesn't fully resolve on its own. If you don't mind a slow build and a deliberately open door at the end, the investment pays off.
Reviewed by Avery
4.4 - Excellent