Legend by Marie Lu [book review]

Book: Legend

Author: Marie Lu

Published: November 29, 2011

Publisher: Putnam Juvenile

Pages: 305

Legend book genre: YA Dystopian

Setting: LA (2130)

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Hey everyone and welcome to Owl Book World! I’m so happy to see you here. Today I’m writing a review about Legend by Marie Lu. I just found out about this book recently through TikTok (if you’d like to follow me there you can find me here) and I just had to get my hands on it. I’m surprised I have never heard of this book before getting on TikTok since I really enjoy dystopian novels!

Legend book summary:

June is fifteen years old and a prodigy. She’s lucky because she was born in one of the wealthiest districts. Now she’s being groomed for one of the highest military circles.

Fifteen-year-old Day was born in the slums. On top of that, he’s the countries most wanted, criminal. The craziest thing is that his crimes are to help those in the slums.

June and Day shouldn’t have any reason to cross paths until the day June’s brother is murdered and Day is the prime suspect. Did he really do it?

What I thought

I kept seeing Legend all over TikTok and realized it was a YA dystopian novel. So of course I had to get my hands on it because I love YA dystopian books. That of course started with The Hunger Games back when I was in high school. Because of that, I thought I’d love this one as well. But I was wrong. Here’s why I wasn’t interested in Legend by Marie Lu.

The Characters

The characters of Legend aren’t the problem. I like both June and Day. The only issue si that they seem a lot older than fifteen but that could be because of the world that they live in. They had to grow up and fast. I get it! I also love how they handle things. I’m not going to go into details but I’m surprised June doesn’t act on things sooner. Because of this, she learns that her world isn’t what she thought and the people she thought were bad aren’t. It was great getting to see the perspective of someone on the right side of the track and someone on the “wrong” side of the track.

The Plot

The plot/story building is where things went wrong for me. There are a lot of slow areas in the book or even a few parts that could have been condensed some. The other thing is that I feel that there isn’t much world-building in the story. If their world wasn’t always like this then how did they get there? I feel like there’s no information and I would rather not read the next book in order to get that information when it really should have been in the first one. The fact that we don’t learn much about how things came to be really disappointed me.

I just don’t get the hype surrounding this one because for me it was really mediocre. Maybe I have been reading too many dystopian novels and they have been blending in with each other. Not many bring anything new to the table.

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If you’re interested in more dystopian novels you can find my list of favorite dystopian novels here.