Champion by Marie Lu - Reviewed by Emma Wagner

“You drive me insane June. You're the scariest, most clever, bravest person I know, and sometimes I can't catch my breath because I'm trying so hard to keep up. There will never be another like you. You realize that, don't you? Billions of people will come and go in this world, but there will never be another like you.”-Day

Champion by Marie Lu is a young-adult dystopian novel, it is the third and final novel in the legend trilogy. It is set in a futuristic America where a civil war has divided it two, it tells the story of two teenagers, one a criminal turned celebrity and the other a prodigy.

The criminal turned celebrity called Day has a serious brain condition he acquired in the first novel, it causes headaches and small amnesic moments. To add to the stress war is stirring up between the two parts of America. The prodigy June tries to help him as much as possible. They are on the side of the republic and end up being in battle for quite some time, enduring the suffers and pain of war, many lives were lost. Antarctica ends up saving the republic, ending the war and Day, in fatal state, is rushed for surgery. Day remains in a coma-like state for five months. When he wakes up, he has retrograde amnesia. He roughly remembers the happenings of the last years he spent with June; only remembering major details, such as his mother's death and how his brother was sick and managed to survive. The sad and terrible truth is that he forgets who June is, forgetting their romance entirely.

The author was incredibly successful (to me) in showing the main idea of the novel being the flaws in a so called perfect world which include the suffers of war and medical consequences. This world used plague and intelligence tests to control the population, its survival of the fittest. Books like these remind us how our future could shape out and the negative effects of “perfection”. One person’s perfect world is another’s nightmare, and the flaws in society are eminent.

I would highly recommend this novel to anyone looking for exciting read that you can’t put down that throws you on an emotional rollercoaster. I thoroughly enjoyed this book although a downside was that it made me (at the end) to throw it on the ground. The ending made me quite sad as I had become attached to the two characters and watching Day completely forget about June after all they’d been through, I didn’t like. Its books like this one that keep you reading and wanting more.