Crooked Kingdom
The Grishaverse universe: The Six of Crows series, Book 2
Leigh Bardugo
Square Fish
Fiction, YA Fantasy
***** (Great)
DESCRIPTION: After pulling off an impossible job, penetrating the impenetrable Ice Court of Fjerda to extract Kuwei Yul-Bo the son of the man who created the dangerous new drug parem from an ordinary street stimulant, Ketterdam thief Kaz "Dirtyhands" Brekker and his mismatched crew should have been legends in the underworld of the Barrel, and very wealthy to boot... but their client, wealthy mercher Jan Van Eck, betrayed them all. Jan even forged a partnership with Kaz's archrival, Pekka Rollins of the Dime Lions gang: the man who swindled two wide-eyed farm boys new to the big city, leaving one to die and the other to grow into the cold-blooded, broken young man Kaz Brekker. Now Kaz, the boy Kuwei, the sharpshooting gambler Jesper, the acrobat Inej, the Grisha Nina, the former Grisha hunter Matthias, and Jan's disowned son Wylan are in hiding, with both the law and the rest of Ketterdam's gangs after the bounty on their heads. The safest thing to do would be to give up Kuwei and slip out of town, even if doing so unleashes the horror of weaponized, parem-addicted Grisha upon the world. But Kaz has fueled his entire life with a need for vengeance, burning the dregs of his own decency and humanity to keep the fire burning. If his enemies thought he'd limp away with his tail between his legs, they've made a potentially lethal mistake, one that might destroy the whole of Ketterdam.
REVIEW: The first book in this exciting, dark duology ended on essentially a cliffhanger, so I had to grab the conclusion to find out how it played out. Bardugo maintains the pacing and the dark overtones of the first volume, ratcheting up the stakes and the emotional turmoil. The characters are long past any naive notion of Ketterdam being a safe and loving home, but it was their home, and still is, even as every person in it seems bound and determined to hunt them down and drive them out. Their flaws continue to plague and shape and drive them, and there is no magic moment where they're all fixed and everything get better; theirs is a broken world, one with only broken lives, and any happiness or satisfaction or even mere survival to be had must be formed around those broken pieces, using them rather than denying them. Kaz is a brilliant and ruthless antihero, a self-admitted monster who only ever can do good (or some rough semblance thereof) when it aligns with his own dark drives and scarred history. His crew is the closest he has to family, but he never lets them make the mistake of confusing need and loyalty with love; they all have personal goals that they're using the others to meet. The plan is twisted and complicated by numerous setbacks and the involvement of international politics - parem is something that will not be confined to just one nation's borders if it gets out, the drug that greatly magnifies a Grisha's power at the expense of addiction and early death - but they have one advantage here that they lacked in the Ice Court, knowing the streets of Ketterdam better than even their enemies. It's a fast-paced story that races along, yet without sacrificing quieter moments of reflection and growth and self-realization that add emotional weight to the plot. They're all different people by the end of the story than they were at the start, and all of them know that even this is just a pause on their greater journeys, even if that journey may no longer include the rest of the crew. The only real drawback to this book is that now I feel compelled to go back and finish off the first Grishaverse trilogy, and maybe look into the books that come after this, for all that part of me suspects that I'll consider them pale shadows after my adventures with Kaz Brekker in the streets of Ketterdam.
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Six of Crows (Leigh Bardugo) - My Review
River of Teeth (Sarah Gailey) - My Review
A Darker Shade of Magic (V. E. Schwab) - My Review
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