I dismissed this book too quickly.

I bounced from the jacket copy and didn’t click with the forecasted tropes. I saw there was a scion of a privileged family falling in love with a street rat with a heart of gold—all wrapped neatly in a dystopian shell—and I absolutely checked out. I only read it because it was still on my list and I felt compelled to finish it before I returned it to the library.

I misjudged Legend.

It’s not that those forecast tropes aren’t present. It’s not that the romance pulled me in (it didn’t).

It was the parallels Lu created between her two lead characters that caught me, her own reformulation of (as she put it) Javert and Valjean from Les Miserables. That was the twist I hadn’t expected, the one that convinced me I had to finish the book. That was what I really liked.

Past-Henry could have reminded me that I loved Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Summer Prince, which used the same forecasted tropes. That book blew me away. Maybe then Present-Henry wouldn’t have been so surprised to enjoy Legend.

I must note that Legend is not The Summer Prince. Few books deliver so much beauty, normalized queer representation, and so many deep questions about the role of art and artists in society as The Summer Prince does.

But Legend zeroes in on and plays with two characters who are opposite sides of the same coin, and I had a lot of fun with that. I would certainly recommend it on those grounds. If you also like star-crossed lovers from different social strata, betrayal, intrigue, and murder then this book is definitely for you.