Six of Crows

I haven't read Shadow and Bone, but I picked up Six of Crows as I'd seen numerous takes saying it's mature and complex for a YA book, written better, and can be enjoyed as a standalone. Not my usual bag, but I was keen to give it a try. Now I really wish I hadn't bothered. A fantasy heist pulled off by multiple POV characters is cool in theory, but its execution here is below pedestrian.

Everything about the book is undercooked. Bardugo can structure an inoffensive sentence, but there's little beauty or atmosphere to the writing. The worldbuilding is all vague aesthetics and no specifics – if you can call it “worldbuilding” to reskin some lazy cultural stereotypes and stick the letter “k” everywhere – not like a fully realised setting that's already three books' worth of lived-in. The ensemble cast is charmless, lacking depth beyond two or three traits each, all delivering the kind of dismal “banter” and artificial one-liners that make me want to grind my teeth to dust.

Flashbacks and POV-changes kill the pacing whenever the story threatens to get too exciting. So much of the book is long, navel-gazing flashbacks, the opposite of the urgency and suspense you'd want from a high-stakes criminal escapade. I started wishing the author had just told the damn thing in chronological order, because she was clearly more interested in backstories than she was in creating a coherent main storyline.

It's not a new observation, but I didn't buy the characters' ages and the total lack of age diversity among the main cast. One or two teen prodigies I could possibly suspend my disbelief for, but a whole squad of them? I see the issue is often glossed over with, “It's a tough world – they had to grow up fast! And it's fantasy, anyway!” but it's not the ages in themselves that are the issue. I easily believed that the teenagers in A Song of Ice and Fire were kids in a brutal world with trauma and burdens to which they had different, complicated responses. It can be done. I just didn't remotely believe it from the haphazard narration and characterisation choices in this book.

The teenagers in Six of Crows reminisce gravely about their dark pasts and long careers like people two or three times their age, to a degree that's borderline comical. Then, just as you're starting to think you could ignore their ages and imagine them as adults, there'll be some cringeworthy relationship drama that feels too childish for such hardened characters. All six of them are set up to be in perfectly contrived, chemistry-free couples, because what better time for romance than on a life-or-death stealth mission? Give me a break.

I stuck with the book to see if the central heist was pulled off in some ingenious way that justified the buildup and made clever use of the multiple POVs. It wasn't. It's just a series of annoying bungles and forced conveniences. My last bit of patience evaporated when a character was revealed, in the eleventh hour, to have secret Grisha-ex-machina powers that were never previously mentioned even in their own POV chapters. Bardugo passing up something that could've given real depth and intrigue to an underdeveloped character, in favour of springing that lousy “twist”, cemented for me that the writing wasn't just boring but bad. It somehow just got worse from there, ending in a tryhard flurry of attempted shocks and callbacks.

I really wanted to be impressed by this book, but it was a poorly crafted bore that never missed an opportunity to disappoint. I think it might even be the least enjoyable book I've ever read, and I'd have DNFed if it wasn't a buddy-read with friends (who found it equally soul-sucking). If Six of Crows is widely considered better than Shadow and Bone, the bar for the Grishaverse must be beneath the floor.