Week of 21/4/14: Legend

Prompt: What are the two most important ideas from what you’ve been reading?
Pages read: Start -70

Legend is another one of those dystopian YA novels.  You know the type, the books that feature governments whacked out of proportion, citizens fighting for survival, districts/sectors/divisions. Those are the trademarks that averted me from popular novels such as Divergent and all those zombie apocalypse stories...  To be honest, I wouldn't have picked up Legend if I hadn't met the author, Marie Lu.  But, while listening to her talk about her book and her inspirations for it, I grew increasingly interested.  When she asked me if I'd read the book while I was getting it signed, I said I'd start reading immediately.  While that didn't prove to come true, I am very happy to be reading it now.

To get to the actual prompt, I feel this book already has some important ideas.  These ideas are shared with many other novels akin to Legend, but they all present their self differently in each.  In Legend, we learn the harsh reality of totalitarian government and plague.  We see one of the main characters, Day (this book is split between two points of view) and his sister looking after his family who are suffering from the plague.  This shows the idea, or theme, of staying together through hardships and the general idea of family.  To pinpoint one idea exactly, it would be when Day and Tess see the soldiers marking an "X" with another slash through it on the family home and they are frightened, as this is something they've ever seen through years of dealing with the plague and those infected.

Switching over to the other main character, June, we see a prodigy as determined from the government's grueling aptitude test.  She receives perfect marks in the academy, but often gets on the teachers and students nerves.  June has a penchant for getting into trouble, although she is not (at least for now) mean-spirited or bad; she is just smart enough to not abide by the imprisoning rules.  An interesting quirk/strength she has is her ability to make deductions about people and their recent activities using acute details.  On the back of the book, it states this is a detective versus criminal story, and I am positive intelligent  June will be the detective and athletic, cunning Day will be the criminal.  Detective versus criminal happens to be my favorite subgenre, you can probably tell that from my recent blogs... I haven't read far ahead enough yet to get a profound idea from June's side yet, but I can predict it will have something to do with rebellion.