Book Review: Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

Book title: Six of Crows
Author: Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Young Adult fantasy
Published: September 29, 2015
491 pages
My rating: 4/5

“Kaz Brekker didn’t need a reason. Those were the words whispered on the streets of Ketterdam, in the taverns and coffeehouses, in the dark and bleeding alleys of the pleasure district known as the Barrel. The boy they called Dirtyhands didn’t need a reason any more than he needed permission – to break a leg, sever an alliance, or change a man’s fortunes with the turn of a card.”

Criminal mastermind Kaz Brekker has been offered a deal of a lifetime: break into an unbreakable fortress of the Ice Court and retrieve a hostage, and he will become a millionaire. But he can’t pull it off by himself. Together with a team of five other outcasts, he sets out to carry an impossible heist.

Six of Crows is the first book in a duology set in Leigh Bardugo’s fantasy world Grishaverse. I read Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone trilogy a year ago, and I must admit I was slightly disappointed. You can find my reviews of Shadow and Bone, Siege and Storm, and Ruin and Rising behind the links. However, several people told me that Six of Crows is a better series than the first trilogy set in Grishaverse, so I was excited to read this book. But again, I wasn’t as enamored with the book as I had hoped to be. I think my expectations were too high, and that led to an inevitable disappointment.

The first problem, admittedly, is me. I knew that Six of Crows was a heist, which sounded exciting, but for some reason my mind didn’t connect the dots and realize that heists are carried out by criminals, and criminals are, if not morally black, at least morally gray. And I struggle to connect with morally gray characters. I started reading this book and the only two characters I liked were dead before page 60. It took me a long time to warm to any of the other (aka main) characters.

The second problem was the pacing. The book started off very slowly with the introduction of the six main characters, peppered with hints about their tragic backstories. Unfortunately, as I didn’t care about the characters, I wasn’t interested in learning their backstories. I just wanted the heist.

After the first one hundred pages, the main characters finally started planning the heist. The pacing picked up a little, and the story had more action and thus became a lot more interesting. But at the same time, the hints about the backstories morphed into long flashbacks revealing said backstories. Every time something interesting happened, the action came to a standstill with yet another flashback. And I still didn’t care. I would have enjoyed this book a lot more if it had been two hundred pages shorter with little to no backstory.

Obviously, to make the story interesting, their plan needed to fail, but on no point was it clear what their plan exactly was. Because the reader is kept in the dark, I never knew whether something that happened was part of the plan that I should celebrate or a failure I should grieve. A lot of the story hinged on misdirections to the point that the technique became predictable. In the end, I could guess what was really happening and that killed some of the excitement.

There were a lot of little plot holes in their plan of breaking into the fortress and getting out of there. Like, if Kaz needed to regurgitate the explosives he’d swallowed every two hours, wouldn’t he have needed to do that some time between getting into the wagon and escaping the prison cell – as in, someone outside of their team must have noticed it?

It also didn’t feel like these characters were seventeen. It would have made more sense if they had been at least in their early twenties. Yes, they were emotionally immature at points, but a lot of people still are in their twenties, especially if they’ve had a traumatic past.

The world building is fascinating, and I would have loved to love this book. I will continue with the second book in the duology, and I have already bought the King of Scars duology as well, but I think I must lower my expectations in the future. That being said, Six of Crows is not a bad book by any means. I’m giving it four stars, and I’m only disappointed because I was hoping for it to be a solid five star read like so many people gave me a reason to expect.