Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
For generations, starting with Billie Holiday, Black women have been singing Abel Meeropol’s lyrics about lynching in “Strange Fruit.” More than protesting an abominable practice, though, the song is about the anguish Black women have felt about their frequent inability to protect themselves and their loved ones from the physical and sexual violence visited upon their bodies and minds in a white supremacist southern culture.
In Legendborn, Tracy Deonn transforms that grief into a battle cry for the inherent power in Black people, especially young Black women. Deonn has written a rare combination in the literary world—an absolute page turner of a story that also forces readers to confront the historical basis of their current realities. As Holiday sang, blood is at the root of it all.
Deonn’s debut novel has been classified as young adult fantasy, but the characters and themes will appeal to adults as well. Legendborn follows the protagonist Bree Matthews, a sixteen-year-old Black girl from rural North Carolina who has recently lost her mother to a car accident. After entering the fictitious Early College program at the University of North Carolina (which would be an analog or peer school to the North Carolina School for Science and Math or my own employer of the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts), Bree finds herself increasingly involved in a secret society of magic users who are descended from King Arthur and his famed Knights of the Round Table. Along the way, she discovers much more about herself and her family history than she ever expected. (As a side note, there is no unified Arthurian myth, so Deonn is well within her right to expand beyond Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur with which readers are probably most familiar.)
It has been more than a decade since I have gotten so wrapped up in a book that I simply had to sit down and read 300+ pages in one day, but this one did it to me folks. Deonn absolutely nails what it feels like to be a student at UNC, as she was one herself. More than that, Legendborn gets its history right, putting it in the same vein as Octavia Butler’s Kindred in its ability to force a modern reader to understand the intricacies of southern society and the blood (both genetically and from violence) at the root of our complicated relationships.
Seeing this world through Bree’s eyes, however, gives the reader a front-row view into the modern-day repercussions of the South’s past, particularly the legacy of slavery and the racial power relationships it reinforced. But Legendborn confronts such issues in such an organic way that nothing feels forced or politicized to make a specific point—the book merely holds out a magnifying glass to zoom in on everyday interactions for the reader to observe and ponder. Similarly, gay, trans and/or non-binary characters are mixed in so naturally that they exist as their authentic selves, just like such folks do in real life. No character’s identity is solely defined by one facet of their lives.
In this way, Legendborn could easily be taken as a strong rebuke of the narrow depictions of race in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Rowling’s even narrower personal understandings of gender. To be clear, however, such aspects of Deonn’s book are natural and flow perfectly within the context of the story. It does not feel like Deonn wrote the book as a direct admonition to Rowling. Deonn has instead written a fantastic novel that, to her great credit, feels like she has held up a mirror to the world of bright young students who would have attended the Early College program she has created. I have no doubt that my own students will see themselves and their friends reflected in the characters in Legendborn (minus the Arthurian magic).
As a side note, one of my greatest criticisms of most young adult fiction is that there never seems to be a good reason for the protagonists to be young adults. For sure, there are plenty of reasons to criticize older generations who have seemed unable or unwilling to fix an increasingly broken world, or, worst of all, sometimes intent on fracturing that world even more for personal gain. But, most young adult fiction leaves the notion that children should be fixing the world unexamined and taken for granted. Deonn, however, has convincing reasons why the story simply must revolve around high school and college-aged young adults. (I will decline to explain why in this review so as not to spoil too much.)
In all, Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn is a tremendous read that will keep your hands gripped on the book till you finish and give you plenty to ponder afterwards. If you have any sort of interest in fantasy literature, it should be on your reading list. The only problem is that we now have to wait anxiously for Deonn to finish the remaining books in the series.
** ** **
If you are looking to buy Legendborn, my humble suggestion would be to order it from Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, NC. It is a beloved independent book store in the community.