Champion

Overview

Champion closes out Marie Lu's dystopian trilogy set in a Republic that has spent years at war, its population kept in line through propaganda, rationing, and a strict caste system based on test scores and military service. The story follows two young people who entered the series as adversaries: one a prodigy soldier serving the state, the other a fugitive the state had marked for death. By this final volume, their fates are entangled with the government itself, as each is pulled into positions of real influence and real danger.

With an invasion looming and a deadly plague spreading through the population, the two leads find themselves forced to choose between personal loyalty and the survival of a nation they no longer fully trust. Lu uses the pressure of war to strip away the certainties her characters once held about which side deserves their allegiance.

As the conflict escalates, the book asks its protagonists — and its readers — to reconsider who has actually been working against the people all along, and whether the institutions built to protect citizens have instead been exploiting them.

A Dystopia That Turns Inward

Where many YA dystopias end with the toppling of a clearly evil regime, Champion is more interested in the murkier work of rebuilding and in the discovery that villainy in this world is rarely confined to a single ruler or faction. The book's central tension isn't simply rebels versus government; it's the slow realization that the people its characters have fought for, fought against, and fought beside are all capable of deception, self-interest, and moral compromise.

That ambiguity places the trilogy's conclusion closer to political thriller than fairy-tale resolution. Lu is less concerned with crowning a hero than with examining what happens to idealism once a person gains enough power to act on it — and how quickly the line between protector and oppressor can blur when national survival is at stake. The novel's popularity among readers of the broader YA dystopian wave reflects an appetite for that kind of unresolved moral weight, even within a genre often expected to deliver tidy endings.

Why Champion Has Been Challenged

The novel's wartime setting brings its characters face to face with combat, biological outbreak, and the human cost of government decisions made in the name of security — material that has drawn objections for its intensity in a book marketed to teen readers. Scenes depicting violence and the coercive power of a militarized state have been read by some challengers as too bleak or frightening for younger audiences in the series, even as others view that same intensity as central to the story's honesty about the consequences of war.

A second line of concern centers on the book's skepticism toward authority. By encouraging readers to question whether the institutions meant to protect them are instead manipulating them, the novel has been characterized by some objectors as undermining respect for government and leadership, rather than fostering critical thinking about power. Elements of the central relationship between the two leads, along with the moral compromises both characters make under pressure, have also been cited as inappropriate role modeling for adolescent readers. In this catalog, the book has been documented as challenged in 2 states and 2 districts.