A crow remembers the face of a person who's done them wrong, and Kaz Brekker is no exception in this phenomenal sequel by Leigh Bardugo. Not only are there more impossible jobs, but limits are tested, relationships put on the line, and the entire fates of nations rest on the shoulders of this motley, beloved crew. If you missed the world of Ketterdam, welcome back to the den of righteous thieves. With this fantastic story, we dive deep into character motivations and past, a world built to destroy all but the rich, and moments that stick with you until the very final word. Don't miss out on the masterpiece that has become the Grisha world, or on the crew that discovers exactly how crooked that world can be.
Leigh Bardugo is a #1 New York Times Bestselling author of fantasy novels, her most notable being those involved with the Grishaverse. Those include the Shadow and Bone Trilogy, the Six of Crows duology, The Language of Thorns, King of Scars and The Lives of Saints. She's also received critical acclaim for her novel, Ninth House, which, along with some of the Grishaverse books, will be soon coming to TV. If you're interested in more of my reviews of Leigh Bardugo's work, you can find them all here.
Kaz Brekker and his crew have just pulled off a heist so daring even they didn't think they'd survive. But instead of divvying up a fat reward, they're right back to fighting for their lives. Double-crossed and badly weakened, the crew is low on resources, allies, and hope. As powerful forces from around the world descend on Ketterdam to root out the secrets of the dangerous drug known as jurda parem, old rivals and new enemies emerge to challenge Kaz's cunning and test the team's fragile loyalties. A war will be waged on the city's dark and twisting streets--a battle for revenge and redemption that will decide the fate of the Grisha world.
In the second book of the iconic Six of Crows duology, Bardugo focuses a lot on backstories and motivations of each and every one of her characters. The most striking characters to me are Kaz and Inej. In Six of Crows, we actually get all of Kaz's backstory, so he is the only character this new focus doesn't apply to, but that doesn't make his chapters any less compelling. In fact, it allows Bardugo to dive deeper into Kaz's thiefing, trickster mind. You'd think that would make him easier to predict, but it's not --he's still just as clever (if not more so) than in the first book. Inej is definitely my favorite character. Her moments stick with me, long after the book has finished. Every time I think of Six of Crows I think of her breakthrough in the incinerator shaft. When I think of Crooked Kingdom, I think of her particular strength and weakness as she yells at Jan Van Eck, and defeats an impossible enemy. Bardugo is able to create these very striking, grounding moments, but also builds up Inej's desire to own a boat and singlehandedly rid the world of slavers and the real monsters. Although we got a bit of Inej's past in Six of Crows, Bardugo really develops Inej's trauma, emphasizes the importance of Suli culture in Inej's narrative, and overall causes readers to cheer for Inej so that she may get her money to get her boat and defeat all the bad guys. The relationship between Kaz and Inej is also worth mentioning. There are specific lines in Crooked Kingdom that really highlight the type of people they are and their expectations, which I don't feel like I could share in good faith because of spoilers. However, I love the growth between them, and this sort of recognition of how embedded they are in each other's lives. It's pretty powerful, in a style sense, to make use feel like Kaz and Inej are only complete with one another without us ever getting to see a lot of these moments that Bardugo describes. In the end, it's one of the reason's we're cheering for them so much: not to see them get together, per se, but so that they can have the chance to work through their respective traumas and fully understand one another and meet again.
Nina and Matthias are also amazing characters whose backstories, while mostly mentioned in Six of Crows also get some extension and development. Matthias is one of my favorite characters in this series, because he's the character that has to come, arguably, the farthest to fully recognize the world he's living in. Bardugo spends a great amount of time creating Matthias as a character we can cheer for, but also learn from, without ever condemning him in too harsh a way. Matthias does have a lot to learn, but it's never branded in a negative life. His changing of his entire worldview is not a small thing, and although he shouldn't be celebrated as having a small mind or even broadening it to a larger one, I think it's important to recognize the struggles that people will go through after being basically institutionalized into hating others. Nina is another great character. Bardugo truly gives visibility to communities who need it the most. Personally, I love that Nina is this powerful, gorgeous, sharp yet fumbling woman who's not skinny. That detail was so important to me the first time I read this duology, because I felt like I could see a bit of myself in her. There's power to that that I hope everyone will start to see in fiction. But, more than that, Nina is also a recovering drug user at the start of Crooked Kingdom. Recovery is not a straight line, and Bardugo never shies away from the details of Nina's recovery. Although hard topics, and difficult topics to get right, both Nina's and Matthias's struggles are depicted beautifully, with grace and care. The visibility that Bardugo gives to readers through the characters of Matthias and Nina arguably makes this pair the most powerful of the main six.
Jesper and Wylan are the characters that get the most backstory within this novel, and are quite possibly the most overlooked when it comes to complexity (but I could be wrong about that!). Wylan, we learn, was sent to the Barrel in a different way than we'd been led to believe. His raw admittance of his family issues and the broken dynamics is not only heartbreaking, but exposing of the fact that not everyone's families are supportive, loving, and accepting. It is Wylan's ability to come to terms with this part of his identity that makes him such a powerful figure throughout the course of the duology. Wylan is mostly concerned with his identity, and his giving up of his physical identity and appearance is not a small thing, and we shouldn't treat it as such. The fact that he was willing to change his face for this group of people requires an enormous amount of trust, and then his subsequent hope of getting his real face back tells us a lot about his motivations and his character. His desire for his curls hints at his desire to get his mom back, to become the person she would have wanted him to be, and shows him that his identity doesn't need to be based in the Van Eck fortune at all, if he doesn't want it to be. Jesper, on the other hand, is also deepened by our understanding of his past. We dive deep into his family dynamics, and his mental health. Jesper's parents did love him, but Jesper's identity was a main source of tension. For all his life, Jesper hasn't been able to fully accept the part of himself that makes him different, and I think it's crucial to understand his parents to know where that came from. Wylan also makes the suggestion that Jesper's gambling habits may in some way be related to his powers, and not using them. There is really something interesting to be said here about mental health visibility through the character of Jesper. Bardugo doesn't dive as deep into this, mostly because Jesper is a character who suppresses that part of himself until it's his time to shine. Nonetheless, it's important to note that Bardugo intentionally makes all of her characters "less-than-perfect" per se, by making them resemble actual humans: they have trauma, they have health issues, they have strange desires and wishes. That is why her characters are loved so much: because they resemble real people.
This balance of backstory and character building in the midst of world building is incredibly impressive. Ketterdam does get a whole lot bigger for us as Kaz and the crew dive deep into the city's roots to pull of their impossible plans. Bardugo does a create job balancing that with the use of maps, which otherwise could have made the entire system of Ketterdam more confusing--props to her team for including those helpful visuals! The balance between past stories and present moments is also impressive. It's the smallest details of the present that pulls the character to the past, to remember even the tiniest of details. I am reminded of how Jesper touch's the jurda and turns it over in his hands, and that's how he's transported back to the farm days of his youth, and how that same jurda is what pulled him back once the memory was complete. There's poetry to be found in the timing of all of this, and the grace used to render these heartbreaking, turmoil-filled backstories. Bardugo is a master writer, and anyone who's read her books will know it.
We're not done with the Grisha world just yet. If you want to follow more of Nina's story, open the pages of King of Scars. If you're hoping for another glimpse of Inej and Kaz, stay tuned for the release of the tv show. And if you just want more of Bardugo's writing, I highly suggest Ninth House as your next read.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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