Marie Lu On Her New Young Adult Novel, Legend

CBS films already bought the movie rights to 27-year-old author Marie Lu’s new young adult novel Legend. That’s gotta mean something good about the book right? (Okay, except that the Twilight producers are attached to the plans which makes me a bit more skeptical).

As a YA fiction lover (even as someone who no longer really fits into the YA audience bracket…), Legend looks like an action-packed, dystopian thrilling novel with maybe some of the same kinds of themes as the super popular Hunger Games (maybe you’ve heard of it once or twice or all the time, what with the movie about to come out and the fact that it’s been all the rage even among adults, seriously.) The dystopian, rather violent and morally complex plot lines pitting teens against each other is a pretty serious trend in new YA fiction.

The plot is something like this: in a future world, both fifteen years old, June is born into an elite, wealthy family and being trained to be a big shot in the military while Day is from the slums and the country’s most wanted criminal. When June’s brother is murdered, Day is the prime suspect and so their paths meet. In some kind of plot twist a truth is revealed as to why the two are actually brought together as they uncover other secrets about their country. I haven’t gotten a chance to read it yet, but it looks like it could be interesting.

The author Marie Lu talked about the book with EW about the plot, writing process, characters and this really interesting commentary on life as an Asian American author. Stephan Lee of Entertainment Weekly brought up that the book “doesn’t have anything to do with Asian-American theme” and that “you don’t have to be pigeonholed to writing about a certain subject just because you’re a certain ethnicity.”

Lu responded with,

Yes! Oh my God, I’m so glad you said that. I haven’t gotten flack personally for it, but I have seen other authors get flack for it. I’ve heard that the author Tess Gerritsen has gotten a lot of flack for not writing about her ethnicity, and I agree with you. I think it’s a disappointment that we’re expected to write about our ethnicity. People tend to tell me, “Oh, you should write something about your mom’s experience in the Cultural Revolution.” That’s fascinating to me, but I want to write about what I want to write about. We should be like any other author of any ethnicity, wanting to explore our cultures, but it shouldn’t be what’s expected of us.

Legend is available in stores now.