Review: Legend by Marie Lu

    I have spent many-a-solitary-hour shut up in my room reading this book, and I have to admit that I'm having mixed feelings for doing so. Per usual, I think Legend is overhyped, but it's certainly not bad for a debut novel.

    Legend, sent in a futuristic Los Angeles, is told from the perspectives of two characters from wildly different backgrounds: June Iparis, a prodigy of the Republic's military-based schooling system, and Day, a wanted criminal who causes trouble for the very country that June has dedicated her life to. After Day supposedly kills her brother, June is tasked with tracking him down and arresting him. She goes undercover and spends a few days on the streets looking for information on Day. Day saves June from a street fight, but she doesn't know who he is until she's spent a few days with him already. Despite having feelings for Day, she comes up with a plan for him to be captured and succeeds. In the process, his mother is killed and his brothers are taken away. Day is sentenced to execution. As the days count down towards his expiration date, June discovers that things in the Republic are not as they seem and decides to rescue Day and his brother. But in a tragically botched escape plan, Day's brother is killed, so only he and June manage to escape. They run away to the outskirts of California, and the book ends with them hunkering down in an abandoned train car as they make plans to rescue Day's other brother, Eden.

    I think I started this book with my expectations soaring, and unfortunately found my hopes dashed. If you suspend your disbelief that two 15-year-olds can basically send "the system" into chaos within a few hundred pages, Legend might just be the book for you. However, it was just not the book for me.

    The main issue is, as previously mentioned, the unrealistic aspect of it all. I just can't bring myself to believe that a fifteen-year-old body could survive falling out of a building or that said fifteen-year-old could remain unidentified and ambiguous on the streets of Los Angeles for five years. It's impossible for me to come to terms with a fifteen-year-old being allowed to handle dangerous military operations. Maybe that's just YA though. *shrug*

    My other qualm is that Day and June have the. same. personality. They talk the same, act the same, and even think the same. I was reading Legend from two different perspectives, but most of the time it just felt like the same person in two different situations. As much as I enjoyed Day and June's relationship and their development as a unit, their individual personalities are just too similar. It seems like a recipe for their teenage romance to crash and burn as quickly as it started.

    (Also, there was a line about a "breath that I didn't realize I was holding", and that, my friends, is how this review went from 4 stars to 3.)

    In the end, it was okay. The trilogy definitely has some potential if the characters develop a bit, but it's really not the greatest first-book-of-a-series that I've ever read. On the other hand, Marie Lu's debut is definitely on a higher tier as far as debut books go, and my hopes remain high for the rest of the series.

Rating: 3/5