3.5 stars.
It’s always nice to start the year off with something good, so I’m pleased to report that this one actually mostly lived up to the hype. I’ve been meaning to read Leigh Bardugo for years and finally got around to it. Six of Crows ended up being great company to ring in the new year with.
Essentially, this book is about a gang of criminals pulling off a high stakes heist. Picture a teenage, fantasy version of Ocean’s Eleven and you’re close. Except instead of money, they’re stealing a person and the stakes are death and torture instead of prison. This book actually reminded me a bit of The Lies of Locke Lamora in that their gang of thieves is led by a mastermind figure who worked his way up from the bottom to become a master of thievery and planning. If you liked that book, you’ll definitely like this one and vice versa. Anywho, the leader of this group, Kaz, selects a team of select people who are desperate and talented enough to break into the Ice Court to retrieve a hostage. There’s Inej, a former slave turned wraith, capable of scaling unscalable walls and retrieving secrets of every kind. There’s Jesper, secretive and brooding, who is excellent with guns and deeply in debt due to a gambling addiction. Wylan, the baby of the group, who is a willing back-up plan and a passable munitions expert. Matthias, a hottie hot foreigner induced to betray his country against his will. And finally, Nina, a grisha, who is essentially a kind of magical human who can manipulate the world around them. Nina’s particular talents lie in manipulating humans, both body and emotions.
It’s not surprising, but the world building here is excellent. I haven’t read Bardugo’s first series, but it takes place in the same universe, so everything is really well imagined and very concrete. It’s not difficult why she’d want to visit the same universe with different characters and tell new stories in it. I felt like this book was really well-paced. It had a nice blend of character development and action. It was truly a lot of fun trying to guess the twists and turns of what would happen next!