As I’m writing this, I just finished the last few pages of Crooked Kingdom, the second and last book of the Six of Crows duology, written by Leigh Bardugo. For those who might be a bit unfamiliar with the series, it’s the set of books that sort of serves as the sequel to the Shadow and Bone trilogy.
I first encountered Shadow and Bone when I saw that they would be making it into a Netflix series. I wanted to read it before watching the series. What intrigued me about it was that it was a fantasy and it explored a little bit of the Russian culture and some legends. If you’ve read the books and watched the series, you might realise that, while it follows a lot of the parts where Alina Starkov is concerned (the heroine of the trilogy), it seems to peter off track where the Six of Crows crew is concerned, mainly Kaz, Inej, and Jesper.
*SPOILER* If you watched the Netflix series, you’ll see that Kaz, Jesper, and Inej are sent to try to kidnap Alina Starkov…which they end up failing to do as they end up rescuing and helping her instead. I thought that was how Six of Crows goes until I started reading the books and got rather confused. After some time and some pages, I realised that the makers of the Netflix series must have wanted to bring Kaz and his crew early on, but they had to build it in some way. And if you read Six of Crows, you might see some similar key points in the story—like Kaz wanting to get the job before Per Haskell and his gang gets it, but that’s just about it. Rather, the duology focuses on a period after the war in Ravka. Alina is a martyred saint and Nikolai Lantsov is sitting on the Ravkan throne.
While I was reading Shadow and Bone, I commented to some bookish friends about how I couldn’t seem to get wholly into it. Don’t get me wrong; it was fine, but there seemed to be something missing. Perhaps a plot element. Perhaps a feeling that I get when I read these types of books. A lot of them, however, encouraged me to keep reading and said that the second and third books in the Shadow and Bone trilogy were a lot better. But if I wanted to read something good, they told me, read Six of Crows.
And so I did.
You know how it feels when a story both teases and tantalises you? You know how some books hold you in a grasp that you cannot escape from other than reading on and on to find out what happened? That was how it was for me, reading with eyes wide open, with heart racing, at times speeding up through the pages just so I could find out what was happening, at times going back in case I had missed a few clues in the pages I had read previously. I bear no hate towards the Shadow and Bone trilogy and I respect anyone who loves the series. But for me, Six of Crows and its sequel, Crooked Kingdom, hit differently.
1. The Crew
Let me start by saying this: I love me a good band of misfits thrown together to accomplish something seemingly impossible. That’s exactly what Six of Crows is all about. You have Kaz, leader of the Crows, a boy with gloved hands and a mysterious, perhaps even murky, past. There’s Jesper, playboy and sharpshooter who can’t seem to get his hands off gambling and cards. You have Inej, so good at fighting and finding secrets, but with ghosts of her own. There’s Nina, a Heartrender Grisha (meaning she can stop a person’s heart). There’s Matthias, a druskelle, or witch-hunter who was once hunting Nina (great backstory there, by the way; read the book to find out what it is). Then, there’s Wylan who is a newbie but valuable to the crew and soon earns his place among them.
Part of the challenge of writing a story is coming up with individual characters who don’t look alike and sound alike. I love that Kaz, Jesper, Inej, Nina, Matthias, and Wylan are all different. Some of them may be a little flat in terms of character development, but a lot of them change (even just a tiny bit) along the way. They may have the same goal (you will find out what it is as you read), but they are different. They have different backgrounds, different motivations, different intentions, different ways of doing things. In short, their hero’s journey is different. They aren’t a perfect crew, and as you read along, you will understand more about them, such as the tension between Nina and Matthias, as well as the distance between Kaz and the rest of the crew.
The thing is, despite their differences, they fight for a common cause, albeit reluctantly at first, and for some of them, even against their will. But the best thing about books like this is that, along the way, they realise things about themselves and the things they are fighting for. As I was nearing the end of the duology, I felt so sad and a little reluctant to let go of these characters who have become quite dear to my heart because of their personalities and their growth.
While Shadow and Bone does have some striking characters, they aren’t particularly appealing to me. Then again, maybe it’s just me. Maybe Shadow and Bone is a little too YA-ish for me. Maybe I’m just annoyed by how Alina’s ever-prevailing thought is who she should choose among the three guys who have shown interest in her.
Whatever it is, it was easier for me to get behind and support the cast and characters of this duology.
2. The Storyline
Who doesn’t love a good heist story? To be honest, I’ve only watched heists in the form of White Collar and Ocean’s Eight. I haven’t really read about a heist and I’ve always wondered how Leigh Bardugo would write it, especially since, as heists go, there are so many things going on at the same time. A few pages into Six of Crows you’ll find out that their heist has nothing to do with Shu gold or precious stones from Ravka. Rather, they are commissioned to get someone to stop something, with that something, being a tool of destruction that could ruin their world.
How they do it, I’ll leave you to read the book and discover for yourself, but I found it well-plotted out. From the start where you are introduced to the individual members and their gang, the Crows, to the last few chapters where everything they’ve worked hard to accomplish stands staring at them in the face, these two books come with a lot of action and a lot of interesting goings-on, stuff to keep you at the edge of your seat until you finish the book.
Heists aren’t that uncommon, but I haven’t read a heist like this one yet. Shadow and Bone, on the other hand, has a little bit more of a common theme: girl realises she has superpowers and is the only one to save the world. Smuggling yourselves into an ice fortress to smuggle out someone who holds the key to destroying the world—well, I hadn’t read that yet. At least, not before reading this.
3. The Plot Twists
As you read the books, you’ll find yourself guessing what will happen next and wondering if, in some instances, Kaz really didn’t know what was going to happen, or if he knew all along and had a hundred tricks up his sleeves; one for every possibility in the universe. Just when you think that you know what’s going to happen next, something else happens that is completely unexpected. Just when you think they are going to face defeat, they find a way to wriggle out of the very tight spot they are in.
Guaranteed, there are a number of surprises in Shadow and Bone too. As an avid reader/writer, I like predicting what will happen next and seeing if my predictions will come true. I predicted quite a lot for Alina Starkov. Some of them came true, some of them didn’t. But Kaz and his crew? They kept me guessing till the end. I never knew if what they said would happen was something that they planned to the very last detail and if some of the mishaps they encountered along the way were something Kaz predicted would happen or something that completely took them by surprise.
4. The Writing
Leigh Bardugo’s writing improved a lot between the Shadow and Bone trilogy and the Six of Crows duology. I speak as a lover of books and I mean neither hate nor harm. But from a character like Alina who is a little bit of a mainstream book heroine, Six of Crows is a refreshing story that focuses on a lot more about what is at stake, rather than on a girl who, yes, wants to save the world, but also wants to deal with a little bit of her love life (nothing wrong there, by the way).
Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, on the other hand, are written like a TV series with its complexity of plot twists and flashbacks, but they are done in a way that doesn’t confuse you. And Leigh Bardugo never reveals everything to you. Not all at once, but in bits and pieces, in little streams that trickle down the chapters and land in the most appropriate places. In little pockets of conversation that leave you with lightbulb moments as you realise why certain characters act the way they do. In little treasure eggs that are hidden among the paragraphs and that you would miss if it weren’t pointed out to you.
That’s what makes Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom worth, if I may say, ‘binge-reading’. And trust me, once you are drawn into those books, you will never make it out until you read to the very end.
