Six of Crows
Written by Leigh Bardugo.
🏔What is it about?
Leigh Bardugo's second Grishaverse series picks back up two years after the events of Ruin & Rising, on the grimy, unfair streets of Ketterdam, Kerch. Not far off the coast of Shu Han, Ravka's Asiatic southern neighbour, the city takes obvious inspiration from Amsterdam. In Ketterdam, though, the beautiful canals and glowing street lights of The Netherland's capital have been painted over with a thick coat of New York's well-avoided streets and the moral filth of Las Vegas.
Beyond the aesthetic differences, the systems that govern the city also vary from those of its real-world counterparts as well. Ketterdam is closer to a merchant republic than a democracy, where policy is dominated by the profit-centric trade interests of a few wealthy merchants. Everyone else is left to find their own way to survive amongst the crime-ridden streets of the city's unfriendly neighbourhoods. As Kaz Brekker, the novel's main character, aptly puts it: "There are no good men in Ketterdam".
Like the Shadow and Bone trilogy's Alina, Kaz is also an orphan. He can't remember his parents, but he's haunted by memories of his older brother's untimely death. The two moved to Ketterdam when Kaz was nine, but their youth and lack of family made them vulnerable. It didn't take long for the city's widespread con-men to trick them out of the little money they had, and when the Queen's Plague hit shortly after, Kaz's brother become one of the illness' countless victims.
Alone, Kaz found his way deeper into the city's underbelly, finding refuge and protection under the Dregs, one of the many gangs that govern Ketterdams backstreets. As Kaz's intelligence and knack for crime quickly becomes very obvious, his reputation for cunning efficiency and ruthlessness grows with him.
On a typical cold and wet night, Kaz is unusually contacted by a man named Jan Van Eck, one of the wealthy merchants that dominate the city's trade enterprises. He explains how the commonly used stimulant jurda, a cross between chewing tobacco and caffeine, has been experimented on by scientists in the Shu Han region, deriving an incredible new drug named jurda parem. The drug is lethal to humans, but when ingested by Grisha, it enhances and alters their powers beyond recognition. The catch is that once Grisha comes down off the high, it leaves them weak, desperate, and horribly addicted. It only takes one dose, and without continued use, they quickly die.
Van Eck promptly demonstrates the drug's potential by ushering in a sickly-looking Grisha, who unbelievably turns a lump of coal into a mass of gold in front of Kaz's eyes. The merchant then goes on to divulge the potential dangers and effects the drug could unleash. A new class of soldiers, war, and global economic collapse are all waiting to be let loose on the world.
For now, the secret is safe. Only the scientist who discovered the drug knows its formula, but he's been taken hostage by the Scandinavian nation of Fjerda to Ravka's North. Van Eck wants Kaz to bring the scientist back to Ketterdam, but doing so entails doing the impossible. The scientist is being held in Fjerda's ice court, an impenetrable prison, government building and religious centre at the heart of the nation's frozen capital.
Never one to turn his back on greed, Kaz's initial refusal becomes a yes when he's promised a whopping 30 million kruge for his efforts. He expertly assembles a team of five other misfits of varying backgrounds and talents, charters a ship, and sets out to try his hand at surviving the hostility of the North.
💭 Thoughts
The beginning of Six of Crows was difficult to read. Every mention of Ravka, its civil war, and Santka Alina, had me wishing the book was a fourth entry to the Shadow and Bone trilogy, rather than a new series. Nonetheless, by the time the Crows set out for Fjerda, I was engrossed enough to relax and enjoy the ride.
The writing in this book, for one, is better and more sophisticated than the Shadow and Bone trilogy. It's darker and more mature, but it's also sharper and snappier. This catchier writing style is actually really important because, with six main characters instead of one, the plot is significantly more important than the reader's relationship with any single character.
In Shadow and Bone, every chapter focused on Alina. Every story arch orbited around her insecurities, her pride, her weaknesses, her strengths, and her actions. As readers, we got to know her as a person. Six of Crows, on the other hand, has too many characters for that to be possible. Unless the book was expanded into several different novels, the same depth of character development just cannot be reached across such a breadth of personalities.
Frankly, this lets the book down enormously. As mentioned, the plot is exciting enough to engage, but it's far less gripping than Alina's story because without depth the reader has far less reason to care what happens to any of the characters. The entire story is also told in the third person, only enhancing the flaws inherent in balancing so many leads. We lose much of what each character is thinking, subsequently forcing us to rely on their histories, dialogue and actions to decipher who they are.
On the subject of shallowness, there's very little sophistication in this story as well. The forbidden love interest between Ravkan Nina and Fjerdan Matthias lightly touches on racism and the common hypocrisy of our own hatred. But just as the characters' thoughts and conversations begin to approach true introspection and questioning of deep-rooted belief systems, the story takes a sharp turn back to the lovely-dovey flimsy filler that most young-love stories focus on. It could be forgiven if other more complicated subjects are tackled elsewhere, but again, just as the book begins to graze the surface of living life with a disability, it veers back to the main plot.
For a book almost twice the length of Shadow and Bone, its impact amounts to only half.