Prodigy

The Legend series is a young adult dystopian quartet told from alternating first-person perspectives of two teens, June and Day, set in a highly militarized future of the United States. The series initially began as a teen retelling of Les Misérables, but as a dystopian novel, draws on Lu’s interest in finding solutions for hyperbolized real world problems. The series originally began as a trilogy published between 2011 and 2013 but became a quartet in 2019 with the release of the fourth and final book, Rebel.

Legend introduces the characters of the series and the world in which they live. Set in 2064, the US is divided into two warring nations: the Republic in the west and the Colonies in the east. The Elector Primo rules the republic from its capital in Denver, Colorado. To keep control over its citizens, the Republic spreads propaganda about its war with the Colonies. Meanwhile, a rebel group called the Patriots is rapidly gaining traction. Each child in the Republic undergoes the Trials—extensive testing of their reading, writing, speaking, and physical abilities—on their tenth birthday. Their scores determine the trajectory of their education and career; June and Day are the only two individuals revealed in Legend to have earned a perfect score, but while June became a famous prodigy, Day’s score was deemed a failure, and he was sent to government labs for experimentation. When the experiments temporarily stopped Day’s heart, the Republic prematurely pronounced him dead, but Day escaped to lead a life of crime with Tess, his 13-year-old companion. They steal to give back to the poor of Los Angeles and look after Day’s family.

When June’s brother dies and Day is wrongfully blamed, she is forced to investigate the Republic further. She discovers Day has a perfect trial score, that the Republic kills children who fail the trial, and that they experiment on the poor to create its yearly plagues—which it plans to eventually weaponize against the Colonies—and concoct antidotes for the rich. The Republic is revealed to be behind the deaths of June’s parents and older brother, Metias, and is to blame for the murders of Day’s mother and older brother, Josh. Legend also briefly introduces Eden, Day’s younger brother who suffers from the plague, but later becomes an integral character in the final installment, Rebel. Legend ends with June saving Day from execution, the Republic reframing Josh’s death as Day’s, and Eden being shipped to the warfront. June and Day decide to travel east to locate not only Eden but also Tess, who has supposedly joined the Patriots.

The romance between Day and June that begins in Legend will evolve over the course of the series as they undergo multiple traumas, betrayals, and even memory loss. Eventually, the dangers of the Republic’s plague and experimentation discussed in Legend come to fruition when, in Prodigy, Day is diagnosed with a terminal illness due to a worsening brain injury that occurred during his experiments and, in Champion, a new strain of the plague runs rampant, causing widespread death and destruction. The rebellion against the Republic introduced in Legend also comes to the forefront as tensions rise between the Patriots, the Republic, and the Colonies—whose social disparity between the elite and the poor is even more pronounced that the Republic’s. The war between the Rebellion and the Colonies worsens over the course of the series, but eventually ends in tenuous peace at the end of Champion.