The Legendborn Cycle

Malory is where the Arthurian legend stopped being scattered and became one story, and it is the version Legendborn is arguing with. What Le Morte d'Arthur fixed, out of French romance and Welsh material that did not agree with each other: the Round Table as an order with named seats, the sword and the succession, Merlin, Lancelot and Guinevere, the Grail quest as the thing that breaks the fellowship, and the fall. Everything an English-language Arthurian novel can assume a reader knows comes from this book. Tracy Deonn uses all of it and then asks the question Malory never has to: who inherits it. Her Order of the Round Table is a secret society at a North Carolina university whose members claim bloodline descent from the knights, and the inheritance rules are a mechanism of exclusion. Bree's claim comes through a line of Southern rootwork that predates and outranks theirs. The legend is the frame. The book is about who gets written into it.

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.