Review: The Last Legacy by Adrienne Young

I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. This did not affect my opinion of the book in any way.

Publisher: Titan Books
Published: January 2022
Pages: 368

Summary

New York Times bestselling author Adrienne Young returns with The Last Legacy, a captivating standalone about family and blood ties, reinventing yourself, and controlling your own destiny.

When a letter from her uncle Henrik arrives on Bryn Roth’s eighteenth birthday, summoning her back to Bastian, Bryn is eager to prove herself and finally take her place in her long-lost family.

Henrik has plans for Bryn, but she must win everyone’s trust if she wants to hold any power in the delicate architecture of the family. It doesn’t take long for her to see that the Roths are entangled in shadows. Despite their growing influence in upscale Bastian, their hands are still in the kind of dirty business that got Bryn’s parents killed years ago. With a forbidden romance to contend with and dangerous work ahead, the cost of being accepted into the Roths may be more than Bryn can pay.

My Thoughts…

I loved Fable and Namesake, so I was really excited to return to this universe and learn more about the Roth family in The Last Legacy. While I didn’t love it quite as much as I did the previous two, this was still a very enjoyable read and confirmation that I will read pretty much anything Adrienne Young writes.

The Last Legacy starts shortly after the events in Namesake have taken place. Although it is meant as a standalone and can easily be read as one (some references are made to the previous book’s events but they are marginal to the plot), the worldbuilding might prove confusing to readers who are not already familiar with it as a lot of knowledge of how things work in Bastian is taken for granted.

The Roths had definitely intrigued me in the previous book and I looked forward to learning more about this crime family. The characters were definitely the best thing about this, even though the focus was on only a few of them. Bryn was an interesting main character to follow and I loved seeing a lot of Ezra and Murrow, but I wish we could spend more time with the rest of the family as well.

Sadly, I wasn’t all that sold on the romance. I love a forbidden romance/enemy-to-lovers as much as the next person, but its development here just didn’t convince me as it just felt rushed and lacking in build-up. Bryn’s feelings just seemed to change almost overnight and I couldn’t feel the chemistry almost at all until towards the very end of the book.

The plot is also quite thin, as nothing much seems to happen for large portions of the book. However, we do get a fair bit of scheming on all sides and I was all there for it! The descriptions are also gorgeous and I ended up not minding too much about the lack of action as I just enjoyed being in Bastian.

The Last Legacy is a cosy, easy read that Fable fans will definitely enjoy. This kind of book was exactly what I needed when I read it, a quick and comfortable book to take me back to a world I had enjoyed, so I still liked it despite all its flaws but I’m not sure it would hold up on a re-read.