Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

 Legendborn by Tracy Deonn is a fantastic retelling (of sorts) of Arthurian legends.  It's not what you expect, but just as incredible and magical as the legends we all know.  Maybe even more so - I love myths and legends and so I was pretty excited for this book, but it blew through my expectations and raised the bar for retellings in my first read-through.  (I already am looking forward to a re-read!)  I've copy and pasted the summary below, and if you keep scrolling you'll get to my review!

Photo by me - this is the alternate cover from OwlCrate

Book summary (from the author's website): 

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.

Like I said, this one blew me out of the water.  I was kind of expecting some stereotypical tropes, and things seemed to be following a predictable path through the first part of the book.  High-schooler steps on a college campus, is completely out of their element, joins secret society and learns they are special after all.  But Tracy Deonn brings an additional two or three layers of depth and takes the story into places I never knew there was potential for!  

First of all, the protagonist, Bree, is Black, and there are a lot of moments that kind of make you stop and think, 'wait, pay attention, the history presented by these characters is a different history than Bree knows.'  The truth behind the legends and the Legendborn society requires peeling back a layer of whitewashed history, and the way everything comes together to allow for that is beautiful and striking.  I don't know if I can fully articulate the feeling of reading this book and having this all slowly come uncovered until each twist got bigger and bigger and all the pieces fell into place, but it truly was a goose-bumps kind of feeling.

Second, nothing went the way I expected.  I saw somewhere that if someone can guess the plot twist, that means you've done a good job of setting it up in the story - there's nothing wrong with being able to see it coming.  In the same vein of thought, Deonn's plot twists were so spectacularly set up that I only realized they were set up after they were revealed.  Not something I guessed before hand, the twists were like looking at a piece of shadow art - random piles before, but then the lights go off and a spotlight on and suddenly you realize how it all comes together.  All the elements are just waiting to fall perfectly into place.  Reading those moments in Legendborn, I was reminded that writing is, in fact, an art form.

Shadow art - artist unknown, image found on Google

If you like retellings, adventure, magic, secret societies, or incredible writings and strong female characters, I highly recommend Legendborn as your next read!