Six of Crows (Leigh Bardugo)

Six of Crows
The Grishaverse universe: The Six of Crows series, Book 1
Leigh Bardugo
Square Fish
Fiction, YA Fantasy
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: The houses of Ketterdam's merchants may flow with gold and treasures from around the world, but the streets are full of grit and filth and rot. Here, survival means learning to fend for oneself, to become a predator or die as prey, and among the most cunning of these predators is young Kaz Brekker, known with some derision (and much fear) as Dirtyhands. A nominal soldier of the street gang known as the Dregs, it's little secret that he's actually the architect of their rise from a small band to one of the main contenders in Ketterdam's underworld among the district of ill repute known as the Barrel. As his nickname suggests, there's not a job too dark and dirty for Kaz and his small band of trusted colleagues to attempt - but when he is approached by one of the top merchants of the city, even he pauses. There is a new drug that magnifies the abilities of the magical Grisha to terrifying degrees... only to cripple and often kill them from addiction to the stuff. If any country secured a steady supply of this drug, there would literally be no stopping them, but fortunately just one man holds the formula - a man currently held by the Grisha-hating nation of Fjerda, in the impregnable fortress known as the Ice Court. Free him, and stop the drug. To be caught is to die, possibly after being tortured by the hard, prideful northerners. But it's not the temptation of the millions of kruge that the merchant offers, nor any national or civic pride or duty to protect the world or the Grisha mages from the drug's dangers, that draws Kaz in at last. It's the opportunity to exact revenge against the one man he blames for all that has gone wrong in his short life... and if he turns a profit on the side and establishes himself as a legend among thieves, so much the better.

REVIEW: After watching the Netflix adaptation of Shadow and Bone, which melded characters in this book with events from Bardugo's previous Shadow and Bone trilogy about the Grisha mages, I read the titular book... and was disappointed. But my favorite parts of the series were the thieves, and I had heard very good things about Six of Crows, so even though this is technically a chronological jump (the events of this book take place some time after the original trilogy's conclusion, for which there are very minor spoilers, though this title largely works as a standalone), I decided to give this book a try - and was absolutely blown away.
Bardugo's writing has improved by leaps and bounds over Shadow and Bone, delivering a tense and complex magical heist novel as well as a portrait of broken people struggling to survive in a world that wants nothing more than to keep breaking them until there's nothing left. Kaz and his crew all have blood on their hands in some form or another, especially by the end, all of them deeply flawed and not always working toward the greater good. Indeed, it's rare that they work toward the greater good at all; Ketterdam is not a place that rewards optimism or naivete, save with a slit purse if you're lucky or a slit throat if you're not, and the gilded merchants of the city are every bit as selfish and devious as the lowest street rat. From the stinking streets of the Barrel to the deceptive glamour of the brothels and gaming parlors to the icy landscapes of Fjerda and the stark fortress of the Ice Court, the settings reflect the cold and harsh lives and situations of the characters, the unforgiving and often seemingly hopeless situations they find themselves in as their plans inevitably fall apart. The plot itself starts fairly fast and keeps raising the stakes and the tension with each new twist and betrayal, and nobody, not even Kaz, is above making potentially lethal mistakes, for all their streetwise cool and meticulous planning and down-to-the-minute coordination. It ends on something just shy of a cliffhanger, which is about the only real downside in the entire book. Fortunately, I have the second installment on its way, and it might end up jumping the backlog line once it gets here. After reading this, I'm tempted to circle back and slog through the rest of the original trilogy; Bardugo clearly grew into her craft, or maybe this was the kind of story she meant to write all along.

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