A review by jorammii
The Hidden Legacy by Christine Rees

3.0

*Thanks NetGalley for an e-copy in exchange for an honest review*

This book was honestly much better than I expected. It’s a group of kids who find out they have super abilities and try to avoid being hunted down. I would very likely read the second book, hoping that it would be technically better.

It felt very Sky High meets The Midnighters (trilogy by Scott Westerfeld).

Rating: 3.5/5

Faye’s stepmother drops her off at her grandmother’s after her dad dies. But Faye is not-your-normal-girl™️ because she has visions of people’s deaths. Sometimes theses deaths haven’t happened yet and sometimes they happened years before, but Faye has never been able to stop them from happening. Her first day at the new school, she has another vision, stronger and clearer than any she’s had before. Things get stranger when the girl in her vision, Rachel, introduces herself at school and they become friends. Faye has to figure out how she’ll prevent Rachel’s murder while fitting in at the new school.



Diversity: +4
Race/Ethnicity: +1 (Rachel=quarter-Japanese?), +1 (Jacob=half-black?)
Gender: +1 (Author), +2 (Faye, Rachel, Hannah, Lucy)
Neurodiversity: -1 (Lucy’s mother)


What I liked:
-I tend to enjoy stories about teenagers coming into powers they don’t know how to control. I loved how different all of the powers were and how they develop and really want to know more about everyone.
-Beautiful female relationships! They were friends, built each other up, and supported each other. We also had examples of girls fighting with each other (over a boy :/ sigh), but that was very clearly not acceptable and turned out to be more complicated than that anyway. While the boys sometimes fell flat and one-dimensional, all of the girls were well-developed and had personalities.
-The twist at the very end. It was one of the things that actually did a good job tying things together and made me want to figure out what happens next.
-Morally gray characters. Good and evil are always difficult to define and I liked how it was tackled. I would definitely have liked to learn more about the ancestors (The Families) and the Seekers of Evil (although that is such a meh name).


What I didn’t like:
-Crazy as an adjective. It’s used off-handedly to describe Faye when people didn’t believe her visions and to describe Lucy’s mom:

Her mom was nuts by the end. Sometimes she used to say things like, ‘they’re coming to get me.’ Sometimes she’d scream at Lucy to stay away from her for no reason.

If Faye didn’t like being called crazy for being different, I would have hoped that she would have pushed more against labeling Lucy’s mom as crazy. Given what we know by the end of the book, Lucy’s mom was probably not mentally ill; she was most likely stressed and people were probably out to get her. So many times people get written off as “crazy” and no one challenges why and it turns out they were right in the end. We need to address this trope! I wish someone had vindicated her memory in the end.
-Not-your-normal-girl™️ Faye. She doesn’t know how pretty or brave she is. She has a different name and comes to a new school where everyone is into her. She’s a size four with a blue streak in her blond hair (which apparently makes her super BA). She fits the chosen one trope, but honestly feels plain and is less interesting than literally any other girl in the story.
-The romance just felt like too much was going on. At one point it was like a love-quadrangle.
-The world-building and continuity didn’t make sense all of the time. It felt very deus ex machina where everything just happened to work out no matter what. I would have liked to learn more about their powers and how they work, but I’m assuming it will be better addressed in the next novel. There were also several spelling and grammar mistakes throughout.