Six of Crows

Did not finish at 40%. After reading the Grisha books by the same author, I had high hopes for her keeping the good sense of interesting world building, but stopping with the overdone YA bullcrap of forced romance, special snowflakes and general cheesy shit. Aaaand it did not happen. If anything, she got even worse. In this book we have a gang of teenage super gangsters, led by the super cool and mysterious Kaz, who sometimes cuts out eyeballs, but like... he is so rad. All of our teenage heroes have some token skill when you know they are just put together to all have “cool” banter and to pair them up in lame love stories. The mission is to free a guy developing a superdrug from an impenetrable witchunting stronghold. As I said, I loved the Russian-inspired world of Grisha. It had that extra, that interesting stuff that made it different, even if it was just a nice veneer to cover love triangles and the heroine being so average that she ought to have a world saving superpower. Also, I kind of like the Russian aesthetic, it's lovely. In this one... well, it's not so fun. We have evil fantasy Finland, though. With evil tall blonds in uniform. Otherwise it just didn't interest me all that much. Ketterdam was like fantasy Amsterdam, which, while different from the average, didn't really interest me. It didn't even matter, we should care more about the gang, somehow showing off the culture wasn't a thing. Disappointment. If I have to save the world, I will definitely not send teenagers, though. I mean I disliked The Hunger Games (shoot here), but at least in that one the games themselves were specific to teenagers. Only they qualified. Here the world is being saved by teens because the author couldn't be arsed to actually somehow try to fit adults and teens together. Why is this so common? YES, you can make your teens feel super strong and all without removing all the adults without a reason or with a bogus one. Here it all just felt like appealing to the teenage sense of “moooom, you don't get me, I am actually changing the world! Can I borrow the car?”. Other than some quirks, I didn't really care about the characters and their sob stories. There was nothing about them, nothing that made them different from all the other angsty teen characters in all the teen books. If characters don't grab me, then I am starting things badly. When the story already feels dumb, the setting is unimpressive and the characters are meh, then we are having an issue. So I basically grabbed a book with a super lovely cover and high hopes and got stuck with an annoying mediocre YA book that had all the things I dislike about the whole genre. About that; YA shouldn't be about quality. When I say YA, I shouldn't feel like I need to have lower expectations for the thing. I mean there ARE good ones, like [b:Sabriel 518848 Sabriel (Abhorsen, #1) Garth Nix https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1293655399s/518848.jpg 3312237] or [b:The Monstrumologist 6457229 The Monstrumologist (The Monstrumologist, #1) Rick Yancey https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1307409930s/6457229.jpg 6647553], but this one... wasn't one of them. Somehow it really feels like that nowadays many authors say “okay, YA it is” and that means that they are creating some Fantasy Light stuff, sugar free, but it's okay, because people KNOW it is YA and they will adjust (read : tone down) their expectations. Good night and let the adults do the things!