Summary Legendborn is the first book in a young adult urban fantasy series by Tracy Deonn. It centers Bree; a young black teen in North Carolina who has recently lost her mother in a tragic car accident. As she attends classes at an early college program at the University of North Carolina with her close friend Alice, we start to learn more about her mother’s passing and the magic she kept secret from Bree for reasons she can’t understand. Her first night on campus she sees a strange magical attack and after a failed attempt at wiping her memory of the incident, an old memory of the day of her mother’s death resurfaces. In order to find answers about her mother’s death she gets involved with a secret magical society on campus, whose members are descendents of Arthur’s Round Table, or Legendborn as they call themselves. From there we delve into a journey of magic, grief, friendship and young love while at the same time being tainted racism. I enjoyed every page. I think this is an amazing book for younger readers as it handles themes of grief and racism so well. It’s also an amazing book for adult readers too, if you are someone who doesn’t usually read young adult I think you would still enjoy this book.

Characters Bree has great development throughout the book, her battle with grief was very well written and felt very accurate to how a young person might deal with grief. She has flaws and makes mistakes, we feel her regret, her pain, and her frustration strongly. She felt like a real teenager without it being corny or overly dramatic.

Alice is the true best friend that everyone needs, she was always looking out for Bree even when she didn’t want her to and had her best interests at heart. Their fights felt real and reminded me of how I used to fight with my close friends when I was 16 or 17. Nick is trustworthy and definitely someone Bree needed to lean on throughout the book, I loved their connection and moments of happiness that Bree had with Nick despite at the turmoil in her life. Her relationship with Sel is almost the complete opposite from Nick’s, I really didn’t like sel at the beginning but found his character complex with strong motivations. By the end I understood him, and like Bree, I started to like him too.

Atmosphere I love both the arthurian legends and the root magic from Bree’s ancestors. I was more interested in the root magic since it had more mystery to it and I liked not having all the answers. Both magics felt very old and I expect we will learn more about both in the following books. There was not a lot of description of the environment and setting unless it was pertinent to the history and racism that was being portrayed. Although the story is set at a University, there wasn’t much of an academic feeling which I do tend to enjoy.

Writing The writing is not flowery and overly descriptive. I think her strengths lie in conveying emotions, character relationships, and building character’s that feel real and make believable choices and mistakes. Her portrayal of racism I found was very well done and was woven well into the story. I had a lot of questions about the magic and history and we slowly got answers throughout the book, it was just the right amount to keep me interested and to keep reading while satisfying my curiosities little by little.

I totally loved this book but I thought the timeline was short/confusing? It all happened over three weeks (I think) and in my head it played out over months. There wasn’t a lot of events to note the passage of time other than the direct plot so to me I kind of built a timeline in my head that was not accurate. She would mention things like “two days ago”, or “two weeks ago”, but to me it felt like the development would have been a bit more realstic if there was more time. This could be a side effect of listening to the audiobook since I do tend to miss some small things when listening instead of reading.