Book Report: Prodigy and Champion

I reviewed the first book in the trilogy by Marie Lu more than a year ago, back during the winter of my senior year when I finally managed to get my hands on some of the most recently popular YA dystopian books. Out of the three I reviewed, Legend was my favorite--but it faded from my memory rather quickly. I bought the boxed set for the trilogy during Amazon's holiday lightning deal sales. It was more of a financial calculation on my part, as I paid a pretty awesome price for three hardcover books. Normally I don't buy a physical copy of a book unless I absolutely adore it. And, to be honest, I didn't adore Legend.

And so, this boxed set unopened sat in my closet for almost three months, until today. Normally, I probably wouldn't have spent my Friday evening binge-reading for six hours straight. However, a friend of mine introduced me to this particular game yesterday, and I'd gotten so addicted to it that my eyes were swimming from staring at the computer screen for so long. In order to salvage my poor eyes, I decided to take a break from the computer and read those books. (Don't remind me that I still haven't finished Love in the Time of Cholera or Nights at the Circus...)

I skimmed through Legend briefly in hopes of triggering my memory about the plot. Just enough so that I could figure out what was going on what I jumped into Prodigy. After I finished Prodigy, I jumped straight into Champion, so I'll be talking about the books in terms of the overall series, rather than individual books.

Legend series by Marie Lu

If I ask someone to give me a YA dystopian series, chances are they're either going to say Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games series or maybe even Veronica Roth's Divergent series. Funny enough, there's something else those two series have in common--the third book of each trilogy received enormous backlash after its highly-anticipated release. I still haven't read Mockingjay because many of my friends told me not to bother, and I wasn't invested enough in the series to do so. I also haven't gotten around to reading Allegiant either, but again--I didn't love the series and when I already got wind of why exactly everyone was so outraged by that book, I felt even less compelled to hunt down a copy.

Which is why I'm even more amazed by what Marie Lu managed to achieve with Champion. The third book was easily my favorite out of the trilogy. I've talked about TEABS (The End of Awesome Book Syndrome) before in my book reports. For me, this usually involves feeling emotionally drained and strung out like a wire--but in a good, cathartic way. The ending is an emotional one, and though I always joke that my tear ducts have been surgically removed, I can easily imagine people bawling their eyes out in the last few chapters of this one.

In regards to my personal taste in stories, I'm typically (though with exceptions) more interested in character studies than the intricacies of world-building. If I don't feel anything for the characters, even an outstanding premise might not be enough to save me. To tell you the truth, I was only moderately engaged in the dystopian United States that Marie Lu built in this series. I did think a lot of it was quite interesting, like how Antarctica becomes a highly technologically-innovative nation that keeps it citizens in check with a video-game-esque point system, or how the United States split into two nations reminiscent of present-day North and South Korea. But I feel like the Legend series was less focused on examining its dystopian elements, than say the Hunger Games, which I think ponders more about the nature of rebellion and the Capitol culture in our own society today. The biggest threat in Legend is biological warfare in the form of a man-made virus--hence, the connection to present-day is a little more tenuous.

Spoilers follow, so read at your own risk.

The plot in Prodigy and Champion is fast-paced, and the action runs quickly. However, there weren't really any major twists that surprised me, except maybe the revelation that Matias, June's brother, was in love with the man who ultimately betrayed and killed him, Thomas. I don't know if it's because the glut of recent dystopian releases has made me more immune to these plot twists, but I anticipated quite a number of the story developments that occurred, especially in Prodigy. Who can you trust in these political games? Obviously, it will never be the first person you meet that offers a perfect solution to everything.

The series also, to my surprise, relies on a lot of tropes I frequently see in manga and Asian dramas. At the end of Prodigy, Day is told he is terminally ill, and so he breaks up with June without telling her the real reason, because he thinks she deserves better. Even Big Bang had a music video based on that premise (see: "Haru Haru"--which throws in a fake palliative boyfriend aka THE BADASS ONE into the mix). At the end of Champion, Day recovers from a successful operation that cures him of his disease, but he's left with retrograde amnesia which erases all trace of June from his memory--which June believes was the trade-off for praying to the gods to save his life. I believe Hana Yori Dango also employed this tactic on Domiyouji, until a bunch of cookies brought his memory back?

I haven't quite digested how I feel about the use of those tropes. On one hand, when I first realized what Lu was doing, I let out a mental groan--because these are tricks I've seen over and over again. But on the other hand, cliches can work--if they're done well. I feel less warm about how Day handles his diagnosis by breaking up with June--the confusion is cleared up rather simply in the third book, when June realizes what's happening to Day when the news report that he's been hospitalized. I still feel like this part could have been handled more creatively. But the retrograde amnesia part worked for me. Those last few chapters were what left me stumbling.

Yes, it was cliche, but it worked for me because Marie Lu earned it. She cultivated the relationship between Day and June across three books, and she'd taken great pains to show that as much as those two loved each other, they would always remind each other of the enormous pain they'd caused each other. When June realizes that Day is free from his memory of her, and she walks out of his life and lets him go, you want to cry with her because after all they've fought for, she's giving him the ultimate sacrifice she can give for his happiness. Lu includes a Ten-Years-Later epilogue at the end, which leaves the series on a bittersweet and somewhat hopeful note. It's also a fairly cliche scene, as one might dramatically imagine what would happen if an amnesiac crosses paths with a former love. I think most readers would need this scene of hope at the end. I still have mixed feelings on it, as it teeters dangerously towards sappiness but, deep down, I want Day and June to be happy together. Even with my notorious penchant for tragedies, that's how much I rooted for them in the end.