Legend by Marie Lu

My rating: 3 of 5 stars




So I finally decided to pick this up after sifting through all the reviews and reading positive after negative after positive after negative, sometimes I guess you just have to see for yourself. And Legend was all right, pretty good when compared to some of the crap I've read recently, it just wasn't anything particularly spectacular either. That being said, I'm still probably going to read the sequel because I seem to have come down with that annoying disease known as "caringaboutthecharactersitis".

In my opinion, this book was significantly better than Delirium, Matched, Shatter Me, Dark Inside, Pure and Article 5. It stood out amongst other members of the overcrowded dystopian genre, but that was mostly because a lot of the others are so atrociously bad, rather than this being overly mind-blowing. It was fun, though, easy to read, quite entertaining, I don't have any regrets about reading it.

The main characters are far less annoying than some I've had the displeasure of encountering in this genre. They're not that original or inspiring but they're the kind of carbon copies I don't mind seeing so much. She is self-reliant and can kick ass without the sexy love interest's assistance. He's kind, considerate and brave. The chemistry between them never seems forced, despite it being yet another "they felt drawn to one another" scenario. Somehow it doesn't matter that much here.

The world building is the weakest part of the novel, something that seems to apply to most new releases in the dystopian genre. A fact which is strange when surely the whole point of a "dystopia" is the world the characters interact in. But whatever, I will begin to sound like a broken record. It does get better towards the end of Legend with clues being introduced about the time before the Republic existed. This gives me hope that Marie Lu is simply withholding her world building to prolong the reader's interest, but I just hope that I'm not left hanging on this matter at the end of the second book too.

Another thing I didn't like - because I couldn't believe in it - was all the huge leaping to conveniently accurate conclusions. The protagonists would look at an unbelievably small piece of evidence and manage to solve an entire mystery out of it. I wasn't convinced, I don't care how smart you are, you would not have gone from A to B like that. You just wouldn't.

Though this isn't going to make it onto any of my "favourites" lists, I'd recommend this book to a lot of people. Those who keep loving trashy dystopias with a forbidden romance story, those who liked any of those books I listed in the second paragraph. Those who look for light entertainment rather than deep meaning or fantastic writing in their books. I conclude that Legend is not that bad, it'll probably be a hit with anyone who isn't getting tired of reading poorly constructed dystopia after poorly constructed dystopia.