Mythology & Folklore influenced The Legendborn Cycle

Legendborn is an Arthurian story set at a university in North Carolina, and Tracy Deonn uses the legend to ask who is allowed to inherit it. From the legend: the Round Table and its named knights, the Pendragon line, Merlin, Excalibur, and the idea of a succession passed down bloodlines. Deonn's change is the point of the book. The secret order at the university claims descent from Arthur's knights, and its inheritance rules are a way of excluding the Black student who turns out to have a claim of her own, through a line of Southern rootwork that predates and outranks theirs. The legend is the frame; what the book is about is who gets written into it.