Jenn "JR" > Recent Status Updates

I had a dream last night and the part I remember is that somebody brought the groceries to where we were and included a giant giant bag of sprouts brand vegan gummy worms that doesn’t actually exist in reality but maybe it should or not but that is more interesting than trying to find the plot in this book

When he asks about “garden of Rhododendron” and his uncle says the queen ordered it neglected and it’s been chewed up by deer. This must be an inside joke since Rhododendron are one thing people can grow in Mendocino county that the deer don’t eat.

this book certainly has a lot more momentum to it than the previous two that’s for sure

this story is so weird. I think most of the people are not human or chimerical - I’m not even sure if we’re dealing with things on the human scale it could be microscopic. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on here.

Only 5% in and this book has already given me multiple chuckles - keep it up!

so much fun - this book has a lot going on

seriously there’s nothing in this book that a teenager wouldn’t understand or appreciate better than some of those 650 page over complicated marketed YA books

i’m 1/3 of the way through and already the world building and interiority and funny little jokes are fantastic. And it makes me wonder whether young adult authors go out of their way to put in so much violence and sex because they think young people need that? I read Lord of the rings for the first time when I was in kindergarten and I read it every year and I couldn’t see doing that with the current ya crop

so much backstory and retelling content from the first two books, and no mention of Bree’s father, even though she has been away from home for like a year?

as I feared, this is bloated with backstory and context. I don’t like the shifting first person perspectives because they don’t add interiority and it feels like so much info dumping

One detail I actually appreciate is Bree’s hair. She’s constantly battling sweat, shrinkage, the wrong product, or the sheer time it takes to wash and style it — and when she channels power, even a carefully done updo explodes into big, wild hair. Deonn uses Bree’s hair as a metaphor for identity and power. It’s one of the physical details in the book that feels symbolically meaningful rather than YA padding.

I actually like Alice — the spunky sidekick with a free pass to mesmer people — but the plot swings wildly from dorm‑room glamour to tactical military extraction to making supernatural deals at a literal Crossroads bar. And honestly, what did they think was going to happen there? Crossroads are where you get tricked and lose your power. It’s folklore 101.

I’m halfway through the second book in the Legendborn cycle, I have to say: I really appreciate the kind of tight, disciplined worldbuilding that Charlie Jane Anders & Annalee Newitz do. They build entire universes without inflating their books into 500–600pp behemoths. Deonn’s ambition is impressive, but she packs in so much clothing description and surface detail that it often comes at the expense of interiority.