After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus.

A flying demon feeding on human energies.

A secret society of so called “Legendborn” students that hunt the creatures down.

And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a “Merlin” and who attempts—and fails—to wipe Bree’s memory of everything she saw.

The mage’s failure unlocks Bree’s own unique magic and a buried memory with a hidden connection: the night her mother died, another Merlin was at the hospital. Now that Bree knows there’s more to her mother’s death than what’s on the police report, she’ll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, even if that means infiltrating the Legendborn as one of their initiates.

She recruits Nick, a self-exiled Legendborn with his own grudge against the group, and their reluctant partnership pulls them deeper into the society’s secrets—and closer to each other. But when the Legendborn reveal themselves as the descendants of King Arthur’s knights and explain that a magical war is coming, Bree has to decide how far she’ll go for the truth and whether she should use her magic to take the society down—or join the fight.

We’ll get this out of the way upfront: I, an author of an Arthurian retelling, love Arthurian stories. Give me your noble kings, your star-crossed lovers, your wild magic supporting and subverting Camelot’s rule of law. But…I get tired of everything being about a sword. I get tired of the women in the narrative orbiting around men, waiting until the story needs a victim or a villain. I get tired of retellings that add nothing new.

As both a lover and a harsh critic of Arthuriana, you can trust me when I say I was absolutely blown away by Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn. The book follows Bree, a girl whose history has been rewritten with loss, whose heart has been forged in anger and pain and hope. After witnessing a shocking act of magic she was never supposed to remember, Bree embarks upon a quest to uncover the secrets of a mysterious society linked to none other than King Arthur’s knights.

I love how Deonn layers the Arthurian fantasy elements onto our modern world. And all those things—the present-day setting, the mythology, the magic and love and privilege—are thought-provokingly interrogated through Bree’s eyes. Bree feels real, and more than that, Bree feels specific. She’s raw and flawed and wonderful, the perfect heroine for a book that is action-packed and epic but always emotionally intimate. I honestly think no one but Deonn could have written this book. I’m so glad she did, and I’m so jealous you get to read it for the first time.