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Bree is attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill through its Early College program, which admits exceptional 16-year-olds for classes. She had been excited about being able to attend the university, which her mother had attended as well, and to share the experience with her best friend, Alice. But her mother’s death in a car accident just a few months earlier has cast a long shadow over her life, where she feels almost like a different person than who she was before the accident.
The first night she’s at UNC, Bree gets drawn into attending a popular not-so-legal tradition near campus, where she ends up seeing something that can’t be possible: a demon feeding on human emotions. And she sees some UNC students fight it. When it’s over, Bree somehow resists the memory-altering tactics of a so-called “Merlin,” which triggers a changed memory from the night her mother died. After all of this, Bree wants ANSWERS. She tracks down these students and learns about a secret society of people called Legendborn whose job it is to protect the rest of humanity from demons. To find out the truth about what happened when her mother died, Bree joins the group as a Page, sponsored by golden boy Nick, who had left the society but agrees to return to help Bree. But she has to hide her true intentions — as well as unusual abilities she’s finding in herself that she knows the Legendborn who are already suspicious of her will not take kindly to.
This story has so many fantastic elements giving it entertainment value and layers of depth: teens and young adults wielding specific magical powers to protect humanity; magic and titles tied to King Arthur and his knights; magic tied to the earth and borrowed from ancestors; a young woman who is grappling with the pain of powerful grief, the loss of her mother; a strong Black heroine whose heritage and race are an integral part of the story. Bree’s race is a part of the reason she stands apart and is looked askance at by some members of the Legendborn, and it allows for some useful discussions within the story. The legacy of slavery in Bree’s lineage and in the white landowners who grew wealthy off the labor of slaves is a vital part of the story; the setting at a university that still has to come to terms with those issues is pertinent. I love how Tracy Deonn, a UNC alumna herself who loves her alma mater, blends these into her story and helps readers think about race and slavery even while they’re caught up in an entertaining and well-written action fantasy. Reading her Author’s Note, we learn that the story originated from her own experience of grief: “becoming the third consecutive generation of daughters who lost their mothers at a young age.” It gave birth to the story and is the cord tying it all together. She explains that she wanted to raise awareness of the types of bereavement recently acknowledged in psychology (the DSM-5) and address intergenerational trauma, including “the legacies of racial trauma, oppression and resilience.”
Add in her love of Arthurian lore, sparked by Susan Cooper’s award-winning and now-classic The Dark Is Rising series, which is also my very favorite set of books and got me hooked on Arthur and Wales, and I have to say I’m not only absolutely looking forward to more in this series, but I’d love to chat with Deonn.
Rated: High. There are fewer than 10 instances of strong language and occasional uses of mild and moderate profanity. Sexual content includes several kissing scenes and some mentions that characters have slept together. Violence happens throughout, primarily in battles against demons. It’s mentioned that a female slave was raped years ago.
