A heist with heart, magic, and intrigue: a peek into Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows
A ruthless teenage gang leader teams up with an assassin, a sharpshooter, a demolitions expert, a witch, and a witch hunter to attempt an impossible heist.
Six of Crows, a YA fantasy novel, is the first in Leigh Bardugo’s duology that centers on six unlikely adventurers who must come together to pull off a heist in the most well-guarded facility in their world: Fjerda’s Ice Court. The story is set in Bardugo’s “Grishaverse,” the universe which includes many of her other books, like the Shadow and Bone trilogy and the King of Scars duology.
Where Shadow and Bone succeeds in introducing readers to the Grishaverse through amazing world-building and a fun magic system, Six of Crows focuses on the characters and their backstories, which is what I love most in a novel. Kaz Brekker is the leader of the group—a crook through and through who no one can manage to take down—with Inej as his right-hand assassin, slinking through the shadows after Kaz rescued her from life as an indenture. Jesper is one of Kaz’s few loyal gang members, a sharpshooter with a big heart and a wit almost as sharp as his aim. Wylan, the demolitions expert, is much newer to the gang lifestyle, but he pulls his weight even as Kaz has other reasons for keeping him around. As for the witch and the witch hunter, we have Nina and Matthias. These two natural adversaries are forced to overcome their complicated shared past for the sake of the heist.
The book jumps between each character’s perspective, propelling the plot forward while slowly peeling back the layers of each of their backstories. Six of Crows has it all: adventure, action, mystery, romance, and Bardugo’s incredible writing style that keeps you hooked the whole way through.
And if you can’t get enough, the second book in the duology, Crooked Kingdom, is just as full of twists, turns, and plenty more problems to solve in the streets of Ketterdam.
