Monday, September 21, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Legendborn by Tracy Deonn


Legendborn is a recently released YA fantasy novel from debut author Tracy Deonn.  I reserved it after seeing some praise from authors I trust on twitter, and its description intrigued: a story featuring a black teen attempting to infiltrate a secret society on a college campus (UNC) with roots in the King Arthur Mythos.  The combination brought to mind a combination of two prior books I'd really enjoyed, Leigh Bardugo's "Ninth House" and "Once & Future" by Amy Rose Capetta & Cori McCarthy.  So I was excited to see how it would compare.

And honestly, Legendborn was far better than I thought, and is the second straight YA novel I've felt might be my favorite YA novel of the year.  It takes a combination of influences & themes - racial history of the world and impacts of colonization/imperialism, stress and grief upon the death of a loved one, happenings on a college campus, and well of course the King Arthur mythos - and weaves them together into a fascinating story.  The main character is tremendous as is nearly everything else, and when I finished it I was only disappointed because the sequel isn't already there in my own hands.  So yeah, this one is a big winner and highly recommended.


---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
After her mother's death in an auto accident, Bree Matthews just wants to move on, to hear nothing more about it - no fake sympathy, no concern, no nothing.  She feels like a different person, but she just can't stay home and live with the memories of her mother there.  So Bree keeps with her plans and joins her best friend Alice at an early entry program for 16 year olds at UNC, not even caring about the academics, but just trying to get away.

But when Bree takes Alice to a party on their first night on Campus, she winds up being a witness to something she never could have expected:  a seemingly supernatural monster in the air, influencing people, and a pair of strange students - calling themselves "Legendborn" or a "Merlin" - who not only eliminate the beast.....but also then erase the memories of all the witnesses.  But the memory wipe of Bree doesn't take, and not only does she remember what happened....she suddenly remembers another lost truth: there was another "Merlin" at the hospital at the time of her mother's death.

Determined to find out the truth behind her mother's death, and the Legendborn's connection to it, Bree resolves to infiltrate the society no matter what it takes, and to get justice for her mother.  But the Legendborn have a connection all the way back to King Arthur....and have never had a person like her in their ranks - a black girl descended from slaves rather than rich White nobility.  And soon Bree will find out that she has her own power, one seemingly from her own heritage, and will have to decide if she really wants to destroy the Legendborn....or to save them.
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Legendborn is a novel trying to do a lot of things at once.  It's a YA novel dealing with a young black teenager dealing with racism - both systemic and overt - on a college campus.  It's a story about a teen dealing with grief-related trauma (most specifically a trauma called Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder or PCBD) after the death of a loved one.  It's a story of the generational impact of slavery, colonization & imperialism, and the importance of heritage in the face of that.  Oh and it's also an urban fantasy novel based heavily upon the King Arthur Mythos (although thankfully it's one in which all the characters are really aware of that Mythos themselves just like we would be in our own culture).   All of this in one book and not a very long one honestly (Amazon lists it as 511 pages, but I suspect the text size on those pages is large given how it showed up on my e-reader) should not work......but it does, spectacularly.

Instead, here we have Bree, a fascinating heroine as a black teen traumatized by grief (the aforementioned PCBD) throwing herself into a dangerous magical society where she absolutely does not belong: they're mostly all rich white kids with pompous estates and inheritances, who have grown up privileged in a system that rewards them....while instead Bree has to deal with things like getting caught at one party with hundreds of other kids and finding herself facing a Dean almost ready to throw her out right there and then (but not ready to do so for Bree's Asian-American friend).  We have her discovering their magic and having to deal with both micro and macroaggressions for no reason other than the color of her skin.  We have her discovering separately her own magical heritage, coming from her own black ancestors - one which the privileged white kids refuse to believe could actually exist.  And all of this - together with that Arthurian connection and the magic it presents - fits together not just like a glove, but like the most natural combination of plot elements to graft together into a full story.

Legendborn pulls that off through its tremendous heroine, Bree, its really great secondary characters in Nick, Sel, William and Alice, and its varying degrees of villains through it all.  All of these characters feel real and have depth, and even side characters who get barely any page time feel real for what length we get to know them.  They carry the plot through a windy path filled with twists and turns from beginning to satisfying ending, with the only minor hiccup coming when the book has to set up a cliffhanger for the next book in this series.

And that's a real minor hiccup of course, one that's easily forgiven given all this book manages to do.  It speaks about such serious themes through a very real place, University of North Carolina, that's only a small representative of this country itself and a very unreal place, the magical setting of King Arthur.  The book makes damn clear that both are real and just as equally important, from UNC's history of building upon the backs of slaves and memorializing brutal slaveholders to the Arthurian's disdain for and mistreatment of any others who might potentially have their own magic and powers.  The privilege and prejudice of those Bree meets feels incredibly real, and forms the real conflict for her to get over....which again, is not to say she isn't facing magical demons and a potential apocalyptic threat at the same time.  And yet the latter never overpowers the former in significance, like in some other books, and the book never takes the easy way out of having Bree become "accepted" and "changing the beliefs of others" just through triumph....because well, that's not realistic, unlike everything else.

(And well the book deals with other themes too, like dealing with the aforementioned trauma and grief, but I don't want to make it get too long here).

There's just so much great stuff here - and the author even has a long Author's note explaining her choices on how she put it all together that really just demonstrates that even more.  I cannot wait to see her follow this one up with a sequel.
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