Recommendations
Books Like Legendborn
A Black girl discovers a secret Arthurian society at her university — and that her own bloodline is part of its history
Tracy Deonn's Legendborn begins when Bree Matthews arrives at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for an early college program — and witnesses something supernatural at a party that she wasn't supposed to see. The Order of the Round Table, a secret society of descendants of King Arthur's knights, has been hiding in plain sight at American universities for centuries, preparing for the day Arthur reincarnates and the magical enemies of Britain return. But the Order's history is not as separate from Bree's history as anyone assumed. If the Arthurian mythology retold through the lens of American racial history, the magical university setting, and Bree's ferocious intelligence gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.
- 1Buy
Carry On
by Rainbow Rowell
A chosen hero at a magical university, whose story is more complicated than the prophecy says — Rowell and Deonn both center protagonists who don't fit the expectations of the institution they're in, and both novels are interested in what the mythology of the institution is actually doing.
- 2Buy
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
by J.K. Rowling
The definitive magical school fantasy — Legendborn is in direct conversation with Harry Potter, asking what the chosen-one-at-magical-school story looks like when the institution has a history of exclusion and the protagonist's bloodline has been shaped by forces the institution pretended weren't there.
- 3Buy
Children of Blood and Bone
by Tomi Adeyemi
A West African-inspired fantasy about a girl from a dispossessed magical people who discovers her power — Adeyemi and Deonn both write protagonists whose connection to magic is inseparable from their racial identity, and both novels treat that connection as the center of the story rather than its backdrop.
- 4Buy
An Ember in the Ashes
by Sabaa Tahir
A girl who goes undercover in the institution that oppresses her people — the same Bree-in-the-Order structure, translated to an ancient Rome-inspired world. The sense of a protagonist navigating an institution that was not built for people like her, and discovering it needs her more than it will admit, is common to both.
- 5Buy
Shadow and Bone
by Leigh Bardugo
A girl with a rare gift is swept into the most powerful institution in her kingdom — Bardugo's Grisha world has Legendborn's same sense of a magical military institution with a complicated history, and a protagonist who discovers her power is more connected to the institution's secrets than anyone told her.
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A Deadly Education
by Naomi Novik
A girl at a magical school designed to kill students, whose unusual power makes everyone assume she's dangerous — Novik's Scholomance is the darkest take on the magical-school premise, and El's mordant narration and strategic intelligence make her the most direct Bree Matthews equivalent in recent YA fantasy.
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Circe
by Madeline Miller
A woman at the margins of a mythological system discovers that the power the mythology attributed to others was inside her all along — Miller's feminist mythology retelling asks the same question as Legendborn: what happens when someone the mythology treated as peripheral discovers they were always central?
- 8Buy
The Inheritance Games
by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
A girl with no connection to a wealthy family discovers she has been left the entire estate in a billionaire's will — Barnes' thriller has Legendborn's same sense of a protagonist dropped into an institution with rules she hasn't been taught, secrets she has to uncover, and a legacy that was hers before she knew it existed.
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