Review: The Darkest Legacy

The Darkest Legacy by Alexandra Bracken
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Almost perfectly coinciding with the long-awaited movie adaptation of The Darkest Minds - which I still haven't seen, though I'm pretty willing to bet that the critics have it all wrong in their utter panning of the movie just like they did with the entire Divergent series - is Bracken's written-word return to this world, promising to be the start of an all-new sequel series. Perhaps another trilogy, all centered on Zu? I'm pretty well down for it.

Naturally, it's as Bracken as it gets, bringing a lot of the same stylistic touches she employed so often in the previous Darkest Minds novels. Unfortunately, one of those is the usual dead air and narrative bloat that so often plagues Bracken's other books - I mean, the original trilogy could have worked better as a standalone or a duology, or at the very least three pages in the 300-400 range like the Hunger Games trilogy, not Bracken's bricks that often approach or even exceed 500 pages (as this one does.)

But for its troublesome length, Bracken does a better job with pacing in this book - it felt like the earlier novels tended towards interminably long chapters, but here the chapters feel shorter, and move faster too. The political commentary of the original trilogy already feels oddly extra-relevant now, but here, Bracken ups the game by making it clear that even those in government who claim to be on the side of good may not be after all. And that those who really are evil, and out to ruin the world even more, are above nothing and are often more than smart enough to really screw over the good guys and gals and enbies.

One touch I particularly appreciated was how this book introduced a few new terms for various Psi powers and their wielders, shying away a bit from the rainbow color scheme the original trilogy had as a signature. Which I suppose is for the best, given that even the movie, as I understand, made a key change by changing the electrokinetic Yellow classification to Gold, the better to avoid the racist connotations of the most prominent character with that power being Zu. (And is the largely gold-colored cover a nod to that particular change? I'd like to think so.) But yeah, now we're getting new names for various powers, including various subtypes of the original colors, and even a few powers that don't quite fit under the old color scheme.

Trust me, Bracken's got a lot to impress us with, not only in this book, but in the inevitable sequel or two. Bring it on, rockin' soundtrack and all.

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