Book Review: Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

The Legendborn Cycle series by Tracy Deonn currently consists of three books: ‘Legendborn’ (2020), ‘Bloodmarked’ (2022) and the highly-anticipated ‘Oathbound’ (2025).

The series follows Briana ‘Bree’ Matthews, a sixteen year old black girl that lived in a small town with a meagre black population. An academic superstar, she manages to get a merit scholarship to SCHOOL, but the day after she is awarded the scholarship, her world is flipped upside down with the sudden and tragic death of her mother.

The more Bree ponders the night of her mother’s death, the more she realises that something is wrong. And that train of thought is only exasabated with the appearance of a strange creature at a student party off campus, and mysterious warriors that appeared to slay it.

After getting caught at the party and punished by the dean, Bree is assigned a peer mentor, whom she later learns is part of a secret society of descendants of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and suddenly her coincidental meeting with those strange warriors begins to make sense.

With the help of her Peer Mentor, Nicholas, Bree infiltrates the organisation with the hopes to find out whether the Order of the Round Table had something to do with her mother’s death, but as she partakes in the trials and events needed to join the order as a Squire, Bree begins to learn how deep the institutional corruption is, while nurturing a seed of her own magic with the help of other black students on campus, teaching her the ancestral craft of Root.

There were so many things to love about this book. Deonn didn’t pull any punches in her craft, ensuring she showed readers the good, the bad and the ugly, and called out the glamorisation of secret societies, whilst also making charismatic and interesting characters that readers would come to love.

My favourite characters in this book were Bree, of course, and William, the Scion of Gawain, a healer by nature, who was studying to become a doctor, even before joining the order and being called to arms by his long-dead ancestor from the Round Table. A clever, capable healer, able to use both the magical element of ether, and his own knowledge from meticulous study, made him a likeable and kind-hearted character that you wanted to be happy. He, unlike most characters in the order, didn’t have the same internalised racism or misogyny that kept him from allowing Bree to be a part of their group. He saw raw, untapped potential in her. His character development across the series, in my opinion, is one of the best.

Initially, I felt like aspects of the world building were a bit slow, but as the book and the rest of the series began to play out for me, I understood that that slight lull in action for the sake of bureaucracy and, through which, fleeting glimpses into institutional racism across multiple avenues that would be developed later were necessary for the integrity of the story.

I absolutely devoured this book and was hungry for more, and incredibly grateful that, at the time, I had the sequel and third book available to me. I couldn’t wait to find out what had happened and how Bree’s story would go.