Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, 2)

Loved this series, the writer's style is a little complicated to get into initially but her storyline is intricately woven. A great fantasy novel, this is the 2nd in a series of 2. It's very popular and was sold out at my local book stores so I decided to order it online and amazon was by far the most competitive price, almost half the price in store.

No mourners No funerals After finishing Crooked Kingdom this morning I realised 2 things: 1. My own headcanon is the only thing that's keeping me going today. 2. I wish I read this sooner - so I would have recovered by now! After finishing Six of Crows a few weeks back - my plan was to jump right in to Crooked Kingdom. I knew I would love it, so I held off reading it in a bid to savour it. It certainly lived up to my expectations (though SoC is my fave). There were times when I thought the plot was too slow and nothing was really happening. But - overall I think that help build the tension for the climax at the end. I certainly wished I could flip back a few pages and stay in the safety of the previous chapters, before Leigh Bardugo ripped my heart out and squeezed every last bit of hope out of it. I laughed out loud at Jesper's and Nina's banter with the rest of the gang. It was needed in an other wise fairly bleak to and fro between everyone. When you're fed crumbs of hope on one page and then given a slap in the face back to reality on another - my emotions were frayed for the second half of this book. As most of you know - I love a good romance. And, although I couldn't say that the main 'romance' in this is even that - the bitter sweet affection that could be something more in time is the only hope I have. I'm filling in the gaps myself. Through all the scheming, distrust and harsh reality of life in the barrel - whether Kaz would ever admit it or not - he is the reason that all of them came together and he was used as a buffer as they all bonded. He's the reason for their friendships/relationships and I bet that just makes him feel all warm and fuzzy lol. I truly hope that one day we get another story from the Barrel because I'm not ready for this to be the ending.

Ok, I’ve just finished the duology and wow. Since I wasn’t coherent when I finished Six of Crows, and have now read Crooked Kingdom straight after it and can no longer really pick them apart, this is gonna be a review of the duology as a whole, but they’re basically one story anyway and I don’t comment on any specific plot points or anything so whatever. First of all, I have to comment on the author’s sheer skill with words. The writing itself is just so beautiful and gloriously visual. Bardugo crafts her sentences in a way that’s so smooth and sweet I could drink them down in one and ask for another glass. There are so many powerful, quotable lines and there were more than a few moments where I found myself thinking ‘I need all the fanart of this right now’. The pacing is brilliant as well - I’ve hardly been reading lately and I’ve been really restless and finding it hard to focus on books, yet this had me not wanting to put it down. One of my comments about the Shadow and Bone trilogy was that I loved the hints of darkness in it and wanted it to be even more ruthless, and I feel like Bardugo has well and truly achieved that. The tone is perfect, with it being properly gritty, yet still incredibly fun, with lighter moments and some excellent humour to cut through the murderiness. On top of the fact that she’s such a beautiful writer, the plot consistently surprised me and had me completely hooked. I loved how Bardugo would reveal nuggets of information at a time, just enough to keep you interested but never enough to work things out. And with the way she writes the characters, it’s often as if you’re finding out the plan along with them, with the only person knowing everything and holding all the cards being Kaz. I was constantly impressed by how clever he is and how everything is so meticulously planned in a way that feels both incredibly farfetched but also completely believable. Part of what kept me so invested was that it always feels genuinely perilous. The gang keep finding themselves in scrapes that I think there’s no possible way out of, and I’m absolutely hooked and worried about them all, with no idea how it’s going to play out. And usually when characters repeatedly escape situations like that, it starts to lose its edge a bit and I just get bored with it, but this was always done so imaginatively and cleverly that it stayed interesting. As much as I loved the scheming, peril, action, and darkness, I was so glad to see that even amongst all that, attention was still consistently given to the character development for each of the gang members, their relationships with one another, and revealing more of their backstories. It’s one of the most compelling plots I’ve read in a long time, but even that means nothing if the characters aren’t up to scratch, so building in that time to make me care about them made a...

In full disclosure, I enjoyed SIX OF CROWS but I wasn't in love with it like a lot of Bardugo's fans are. The world-building was interesting, the fantasy heist shtick was fresh, and the characters were diverse enough to be enjoyable, even if they are shamefully aged too low for their skill sets in order to sell the book to teens. But CROOKED KINGDOM leaned into all the weak parts of SIX OF CROWS, to make for a sloppy, sappy, bloated follow-up. The Sloppy: A repetitive story that takes forever to get going and constantly meanders. When the action heats up, Bardugo turns down the flame with flashbacks, telling (and retelling) of what just happened instead of letting the reader put it together, and "twists" that always come down to Kaz having some master plan that the reader never was given hints to. If you enjoyed the Oceans 11/12/13 style of "here's new information which completely invalidates the stakes and drama of the last scene", you'll love CROOKED KINGDOM. Bardugo does this constantly and by the time I was three or four hundred pages in, I simply stopped caring about any drama in story. The Sappy: Gosh does Bardugo love the sound of her own voice and her characters. They're all so in their own heads, all obsessed with their own legacies and wounds, and their internal monologues go on and on and on. As does the romantic tension, which was completely cringeworthy. It felt like half of the book was devoted to this sort of navel gazing and teen angst drama, which is completely at odds for a group that is supposed to be the roughest, toughest, baddest heisters that ever heisted. Overall a saccharine and self-absorbed slog. The Bloated: Here's the basic pattern to CROOKED KINGDOM: Something happens in a character's POV scene. We end on a cliffhanger. We jump to another POV and rewind, playing back the events from a slightly different viewpoint. Rinse repeat. The revolving POV structure did not need to be in this book, but Bardugo forced it in anyway, which required her to bloat out POV chapters with those rewind retells, with flashbacks (many of which were happening when she should've been building tension in the second half of the book), and with telling, telling, telling. So much telling instead of showing. By the time I was done I felt literal relief at no longer having to be told what an elaborate and intricate heist story I was reading. At the end of the day, CROOKED KINGDOM underscores that there are simply different kinds of readers in the world. There are those who flock to the light, floaty, YA fantasy worlds full of teenage wunderkinds where being over 30 is ancient, where there's always time for an awkward kiss, and where the stakes don't really ever matter. If that's you, you'll like CROOKED KINGDOM as you probably already liked SIX OF CROWS (you've also probably already given up on reading this review). In wh...