Six of Crows

I'm not sure exactly how good Six of Crows is, but I am sure I had a great time reading it.

I was underwhelmed in the beginning. Then things picked up and I was having the time of my life. Now having finished it and looking at the book as a whole, I'm not near as blown away as a lot of people are. Here's a few particular choices that got to me:

-Worldbuilding: I found myself skimming passages meant to orient me, because they felt like flowery fluff. The concept of Grisha was explained poorly and slowly, especially given its significance to the politics of the world and dynamics between characters. Certain elements were obvious because of context or repetition, but a lot of the time it felt more like telling than showing.

-Exposition: I'm all for establishing backstory, but I don't like shoehorning things in to justify something that either just happened or is about to happen. Like checking a box to be able to move forward with the story. For example, why did Inej have a major epiphany while climbing an incinerator shaft? It also felt like Wylan was shortchanged.

-Representation: Six of Crows did have a surprising (to me) amount of representation. Bardugo explored disability, sexuality, and sex work. However, some of this was done with a broad brush. An example of this is Inej's ultimatum to Kaz on page 434. I love Inej, and of course I understand not wanting to be with someone unless they can be vulnerable. But it seemed to frame Kaz's aversion to physical touch as some sort of personal failing? Maybe (okay, definitely) he has a lot to work through. But it's not his fault he developed some issues after being surrounded by bloated corpses including the body of his beloved brother.

At this point it might sound like I didn't enjoy SoC at all, but I did! It was a lot of fun, and I was invested in the characters. I very badly wanted them to be okay and none of them were ever okay, not even close. I think Bardugo did a good job with her teenage girl characters. She provided Nina and Inej with strength and cunning, but didn't do so by portraying femininity as weak or inferior. There were parts that made me laugh out loud.

In all, Six of Crows is a combination of (1) angsty young love, (2) tragic backstory, and (3) high-stakes action scenes. Sometimes the ratio of those three components felt off. But, it's a quick read for the page count, and even if I thought some of it was dumb, I am invested. I want to read Crooked Kingdom in the near future.