She-Geeks discussion

Happy reading and mark your spoilers, please!

I read this book last month and thought it was quite enjoyable and had some good ideas :) I'm looking forward to here from you, what you thought about it :)

As someone that hasn't read this book (so, guessing on the specific complaint) and is speaking more broadly about YA and other fiction in how girls and women are generally treated/portrayed/"developed", I don't think you're being nit-picky. I think there's both an over-saturation (and, therefore, "normalizing") amount of repetitive violence (against girls and women in particular) in a lot of fiction and the majority of it is handled poorly (as "plot" or cheap character "backstory"/"development"), without the actual real-life impact and effects.

It's like the struggle of finding a story with GLBTQ characters without being a "coming out" story. Can I have a story with a female protagonist that doesn't deal with that sort of violence sometimes?

Kim, are you referring to (view spoiler)[the street fighting scene in which June hurts Kaede pretty bad and is saved by Day in the end? (hide spoiler)]

I felt that violence was used in the book, as in many dystopian narratives, to show how bad the world is in which the story is set. Violence against women is often a way in which stories try to be "gritty" and dark.
On the other hand, in Legend, most people are very violent, including the women. I don't think the book is trying to normalise violence, but it uses it to show how the characters have been corrupted by the regime.
The question is, of course, if showing violence was the only way the book could have used to get this message across, or if we have an instance of lazy storytelling here.

No, I did not feel interested in continuing the series