Legend

1 of 7
Legend
336 pages; Speak
Know your enemy and know yourself, that's how to win the battle. Such are the truths learned by 15-year-old June Iparis, whose greatest fear—the destruction of the Republic she loves—is also her key to survival. Fast-tracked by the government for a life on the front lines like her older brother, Metias, June is the youngest, nimblest recruit in an elite group. Meanwhile, on the other side of this dystopian, war-torn Los Angeles lives a teenage boy known to the authorities as "Day," the most wanted—and yet, adamantly anti-violence—criminal in the Republic. When Day is accused of murdering Metias, and June is assigned to track him down, their lives intersect, forcing secrets about the Republic to rise to the surface. There's as much to admire here about the heroine—who wouldn't root for a kid who proclaims, in the name of research, "It wasn't my fault I had to scale the side of a 19-story building with an XM-621 gun strapped to my back"—as there is to learn about the supposed Robin Hoodesque "villain." Thankfully, the two's adventures continue in Prodigy and Champion, as the bonus of YA fiction is that story never ends with book one. The joy of the genre, however, is that we become—for a few hundred pages—as invincible and immortal as the protagonists.
— Jordan Foster