Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo (Henry Holt and Company, 2015)
★★★★☆
A motley crew with shifting alignments must overcome internal strife to pull off a near-impossible heist.
Reading this, my first Leigh Bardugo book, was like taking a characterization and worldbuilding masterclass. She has a knack for delivering the exact right words in the exact right span of breath to capture character:
Per Haskell had railed at him and called him a fool for the expense, but eventually he’d relented. According to Kaz, the old man’s exact words had been, “Take all that rope and hang yourself.”
“Shut it,” Oomen snarled. The rules of parley dictated that only the lieutenants could speak once negotiations had begun. Jesper mouthed “sorry” and elaborately pantomimed locking his lips shut.
She even got me to care about a throwaway character by the end of literally the first page.
The same deftness applies to her worldbuilding: Bardugo threads in just the right amount of detail to illuminate the setting and history without bogging down the pace.
No matter what they thought of [Kaz], they’d walk a little taller tonight. It was why they stayed, why they gave their best approximation of loyalty for him. When he’d officially become a member of the Dregs, he’d been twelve and the gang had been a laughingstock, street kids and washed-up cadgers running shell games and penny-poor cons out of a run-down house in the worst part of the Barrel. But he hadn’t needed a great gang, just one he could make great—one that needed him.
Now they had their own territory, their own gambling hall, and that run-down house had become the Slat, a dry, warm place to get a hot meal or hole up when you were wounded. Now the Dregs were feared. Kaz had given them that. He didn’t owe them small talk on top of it.
Besides, Jesper would smooth it all over. A few drinks in and a few hands up and the sharpshooter’s good nature would return. He held a grudge about as well as he held his liquor, and he had a gift for making Kaz’s victories sound like they belonged to everyone.
In three paragraphs, we get so much about the Dregs, Ketterdam, and Kaz’s agency (and boundaries). Lots of that is word choice: “cadgers,” “shell games,” “hole up.” As a plus, even a neutral telling of the crew’s boosted rapport—“Everyone bonds over the victory”—is rephrased in terms of one of the member’s strengths.
It’s no surprise I became deeply invested in Kaz and his crew by the end of the first act. Unfortunately, the middle of the book is a bit of a drag. We leave well-drawn Ketterdam for a new, fairly barren location and a long hike to the party’s destination. Conflicts between the crew and flashbacks revealing their pasts are compelling on balance, but things only really start to pick up again when Kaz starts to falter. The heist itself is sometimes hard to follow, including because some key components of the plan don’t get revealed until the moment they’re happening.
Still, I remained attached to the characters—and as a result, the later romantic scenes, and the stellar (if somewhat predictable) climax, delivered wonderful frisson. Plus points for some cool magic (“the Small Science,” ugh! 🖤).
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