Six of Crows

by Leigh Bardugo

ISBN 978-1-62779-212-7

“Geels looked at Kaz as if he was finally seeing him for the first time. The boy he’d been talking to had been cocky, reckless, easily amused, but not frightening—not really. Now the monster was here, dead-eyed and unafraid. Kaz Brekker was gone, and Dirtyhands had come to see the rough work done.”

Kerch is a land that worships gold and industry, and in this the slum rats of the Barrel are no different from the more supposedly more upstanding merchers of Ketterdam. Kaz Brekker has spent years building up the Dregs gang from nothing, creating the Crow Club, and laying a territorial claim to Fifth Harbour. With such a ruthless reputation, it is no surprise that a mercher might approach him with an unusual job, one that cannot be entrusted to just anyone. A Shu scientist has been captured by the Fjerdans, and is being held in the impregnable Ice Court. He holds the knowledge of a new drug, jurda parem, which can take Grisha power from miraculous to unimaginable, with terrible consequences, both for the Grisha, and for the world market. Kaz assembles a crew of his best pickpockets and thieves to travel to Fjerda during the Hringkalla festival, and attempt the impossible—breach the Ice Court, and extract Bo Yul-Bayur, before anyone else gets to him.

Kaz’s crew consists of six players, including himself. Inej, a Suli girl whose indenture to the Menagerie brothel was bought out by the Dregs thanks to her skills as an acrobat. Nina, a Grisha Heartrender stranded in Ketterdam by the Ravkan Civil War. Matthias, a disgraced Fjerdan druskelle—witch hunter—serving time in a Kerch prison thanks to Nina. Jesper, a Zemeni gunman with a dangerous fondness for gambling. And Wylan, a runaway mercher’s son with a talent for blowing things up.  Together, they might just have the right combination of talent and desperation to get the job done. All of the characters are teens, though they mainly read as much older, even accounting for their rough lives. However, this doesn’t particularly detract from the story.

Six of Crows is an extremely well-paced story, balanced between the past and the present, as well as action and character development. The present focuses on the heist, and how the group will extract Bo Yul-Bayur from Fjerda’s Ice Court. But Bardugo also carefully measures out backstory, slowly revealing how the boy Kaz Reitveld became the Barrel lieutenant Kaz “Dirtyhands” Brekker. Character development is married to plot development, as Nina and Matthias’ history plays a critical role, and leads to an unlikely alliance. We find out why Matthias was in Hellgate Prison, and how he got there. Before the crew can even head to Fjerda, they must break Matthias out of Hellgate, and convince him to betray his country and help them with the heist. Which might be somewhat difficult since he vowed to kill Nina Zenik if he ever escaped.

Six of Crows also represents an excellent continued development of the Grishaverse. Bardugo uses and expands the world she already built in her Grisha Trilogy, but this adventure takes an entirely different direction; it is a heist story in contrast to Alina’s epic. While most of the characters in the original trilogy were Grisha, here the cast represents a wider range of more diverse folk. Nina is decidedly not skinny, Kaz walks with a limp and uses a cane, Jesper and Wylan are queer, and Inej and Jesper are people of colour. They come from different countries and upbringings, and have very different dreams for what they will do with their share of the 30 million kruge haul.

Six of Crows also contains ample romance. Nina and Matthias have a fiery chemistry belied by their mortal enemy status. Inej secretly hopes that Kaz might one day return her feelings, while also doubting whether forming a relationship with him would be a good idea, or if he is even capable of such a thing. The cutest flirtation belongs to Jesper and Wylan, who only finally come around to directly acknowledging their interest in the heat of the heist, when plans have gone off the rails, and everyone is improvising. Wylan is the only one of the main six who is not a point of view character, and we do not get flashbacks for him or Jesper, but I hope their story will be further developed in Crooked Kingdom, which I cannot wait to read.

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