Book Review - Legend, by Marie Lu

I took my time getting to this one, due to my tendency of avoiding hype and being slightly burnt out on the YA dystopia genre. That may be why I ended up being less impressed with it than I thought I would, despite glowing reviews and a few flashy writing and format tricks. Even so, it’s a worthy addition to the genre, and has promise as the first in a series.

Legend takes place in a future version of Los Angeles. This LA is an important city in The Republic, a coalition of western states that bears more than a passing resemblance to North Korea. Children are physically and mentally tested at a young age, with the best and brightest being inducted into an endless war with The Colonies to the east. June Iparis is a young Republic prodigy who is preparing for a military career and an affluent life, but a sudden tragedy derails her plans and puts her on the the trail of Day, the most wanted criminal in Los Angeles. For his part, Day is simply trying to survive, scrounging food and supplies for his impoverished family and tweaking the Republic’s nose along the way. When he finds himself implicated in a crime he didn’t commit, he will have to rely on someone who has every reason to hate him in order to escape retribution.

The book relies on split narration by two separate protagonists, which is becoming dangerously close to overdone as a YA literary trope. Lu handles it pretty well, though; despite other reviews to the contrary, I found June and Day to be well-developed characters with very distinctive voices. The neat gimmick of using colored ink in Day’s chapters didn’t hurt, either. In my opinion, though, the book’s greatest strength is in the world itself. As I mentioned above, Legend’s Republic mirrors North Korea, where the cult of personality, ceaseless propaganda, and brutal repression of anything that resembles dissent results in a populace that brainwashes itself in order to survive. Lu’s vision of this particular future contains all of the elements that I find so appalling and fascinating: the enormous gulf between social classes, the bellicose and dishonest jingoism, and the trap people get caught in when the state demands loyalty to itself over one’s own friends and family. For this reason, I found Day’s chapters especially readable.

I couldn’t get as excited about the book as I wanted to, though, and I think it’s because there weren’t any real surprises in store. The plot and character threads follow familiar patterns, and the twists are well foreshadowed. There were a couple of particularly interesting mysteries that were left unresolved, presumably to be explored in later books. This feeling of familiarity is compounded by a smattering of setting and plot elements that aren’t quite as original as some of the others. Teen girls that attract the attention of totalitarian heads of state and dystopian capital cities in Colorado sound an awful lot like another series I've read.

However, while I wasn’t floored, I still enjoyed the book. It’s a solid YA dystopia, and definitely worth checking out for fans of the genre. I was intrigued enough by the setting to pick up an ARC of the next book, because the world Lu builds has a lot of promise.

Verdict: 3 / 5