When I went to the bookstore with my best friends in January, my eyes scanned the young adult shelves. Many best-selling books face forward to draw attention to them easily. I looked at them, ignoring the ones with their spines facing me. A book stood out to me with a woman of color on the cover with magic surrounding her arms. At the time, the character's race was not important to me. I saw a book about magic and when I read the back, it caught my attention. I took a photo of the cover to put in my mind for later and buy it another time.
Sometime after that day, I found myself scrolling through TikTok and found the book in a list of someone's favorite books of the year. I looked into it more and found that many others on the platform loved the book. I bought Legendborn and ended up reading the entirety of its five hundred pages in two sittings. For many, the story ends there. However, for me, Legendborn's story filled with love, grief, action, and discussions of race drew me in. I went back on TikTok to join the discussion of the book and found many people discussing the importance of the book as they rarely saw a woman of color as the main character. The main character, Briana (Bree) Matthews, is not only a woman of color protagonist but also a protagonist. The book is told from her point of view and shows the power she holds. I started to dig deeper into racial depictions in young adult (YA) speculative fiction, and this project formed.
My method of study revolves around a traditional research project approach. I focused on the few articles and chapters available by a handful of scholars to discover the background information in the speculative fiction genre before delving into Legendborn by Tracy Deonn and discussing her defying the publishing industry's expectations. Beyond the book itself, I will discuss the community's discussion about the book and how many people of color react to the story and its depictions of Bree Matthews, the main character and a woman of color.
I found that Legendborn is more than just a book for many young adults to enjoy. It started discussions about the lack of representation and can change not just the literary community but the entire Black community. Lack of proper representation affects how people of color view themselves and their spot in the world. Legendborn gives them that important representation of a woman of color main character. Her place within Deonn's contemporary world shows young people of color their ability to have power, agency, and more as they navigate their lives. Despite the immensely white speculative fiction genre, Legendborn by Tracy Deonn breaks the genre's expectations that characters of color are the antagonistic outcast controlled by others and that discussions surrounding racism and history should remain in realistic genres.Â