Review: Legendary

Legendary by Stephanie Garber
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The first book in this series was a little hype-damaged for me, and I'm sorry to say that the hype damage continues in the second part - not the final part, though, not when both books have been as wildly successful as they have. No way is Garber gonna end it here, and she's already promised us one more book, aptly called Finale. This middle entry, though, is on the level of Michael Grant's Hunger or Susan Dennard's Windwitch in terms of noticeable Sophomore Slump.

Garber gives us a book that's about a hundred pages too long - after a while it really wears thin, the whole "Who is Legend?" and "What's his deal with the Fates?" mystique. It would help if the book was a little better developed in terms of world-building - there's a lot that goes too unexplained, especially for the second book of the series. Legend himself gets on my nerves a lot too after a while, because he's just so ridiculously overpowered that it's hard to take him seriously. I'm reminded of Pierce Brown's critique of The Wheel of Time - when you overpower a character so soon, the story gets really boring after a while. (Okay, so Brown was critiquing Robert Jordan's hero, and a giant series that goes on far longer than the Caraval trilogy will, but still.) But there's enough of a human side to Legend after all that there's one action he takes near the end that actually, finally, endears him to me.

And then Garber goes and imitates The Cruel Prince at the end, and not for the first time either. I don't know why, but I just feel like too many people are trying to do the Holly Black style these days, and more often than not it just doesn't work. (Like how, for me, it usually doesn't work with Black's own books.)

I'm still giving this book three stars because I enjoyed Tella's POV and her continued super-loving sister dynamic with Scarlett. Those two were this book's real saving graces, just like they were in Caraval. But I seriously hope Garber's building up to a much more impressive book in Finale, otherwise that's the end of me hand-selling Caraval at work.

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