Title: Legendborn

Series: Legendborn #1

Author: Tracy Deonn

Filled with mystery and an intriguingly rich magic system, Tracy Deonn’s YA contemporary fantasy Legendborn offers the dark allure of City of Bones with a modern-day twist on a classic legend and a lot of Southern Black Girl Magic.

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.

‘But when your entire world is shattering, a little bit of magic is . . . nothing.’

Oh but it is Bree!

This story is just utterly fab. I’m trying to write the words to justify it but my brain is just blank because I’m not sure I could conjure up the words! (See what I did there, conjure!!)

This was an Arthurian legend retold but with a powerful message, well more than one really. It was fascinating and totally gripped me. You know when you sit there and all these theories run through your head and then you dismiss them by the next paragraph? That was me!

That ending though. I thought my heart was going to rip through my chest, it was beating so fast!

Utterly, utterly brilliant.