Champion (Legend #3)
By Marie Lu
Genre: YA Dystopian
Recommended Ages: 15+
***Spoilers if you haven’t read the first two books***

June and Day have sacrificed so much for the people of the Republic—and each other—and now their country is on the brink of a new existence. June is back in the good graces of the Republic, working within the government’s elite circles as Princeps-Elect, while Day has been assigned a high-level military position.

But neither could have predicted the circumstances that will reunite them: just when a peace treaty is imminent, a plague outbreak causes panic in the Colonies, and war threatens the Republic’s border cities. This new strain of plague is deadlier than ever, and June is the only one who knows the key to her country’s defense. But saving the lives of thousands will mean asking the one she loves to give up everything.

The Gist:

The final installment of the Legend Trilogy is chock full of action and higher stakes. With Day’s illness the reader feels the race against time even more strongly. I still am left feeling slightly unsatisfied by the series because I didn’t feel emotionally connected to the characters, but I did enjoy reading the books.

What I Liked:

I liked that Day was sick. Okay, I didn’t like that someone was sick, but I liked that his character was sick for the sake of the story.  It added a real urgency to what he and June did and made this book feel like the fastest-paced one in the series.

I’ve always thought Marie handled the conflict between June and Day well, especially when it came to their different backgrounds. And I think she continued to handle their conflict well when it came to Eden in Champion.

The new Antarctica was fascinating to me. Loved seeing a different part of the world outside the Republic. If anything, I would have liked to have seen more of it.

Anden was one of my favorite new characters in book two and we got to see even more character development in him. We see him lose his temper and I LOVED how we got to see a different side of the previous elector through Anden’s memories. It’s a great reminder that most everyone has both good and bad in them

What I Didn’t Like:

For me, the whole the Colonies are an enemy thing wasn’t fleshed out enough. I didn’t get to see enough of what life was like in the Colonies and why it was worse than the Republic. The result of this for me was it made all the action feel like disjointed strings of events that had no real purpose. Marie did such a great job portraying the Republic as the enemy that the sudden shift to it being good left an empty space where that evil was supposed to go. And there wasn’t enough background info about the Colonies to fill that empty space.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I missed Tess. Mainly because her personality was different from the main characters.  It had begun to feel like lots of characters were similar in how they reacted to things and I would have liked more diverse personalities in the series.

I didn’t like the ending. Not necessarily because it was a bad or poorly written ending, I just think my personal preference would have ended the story differently.

LunasLuckyRating: 3.5/5 Lunas