Six of Crows

Six of Crows is Leigh Bardugo's 2015 YA fantasy novel, the first volume of the Six of Crows duology and the book that established Bardugo as the major YA fantasy writer of her generation. The setting is Ketterdam, the corrupt mercantile city of Bardugo's earlier Shadow and Bone trilogy: a Dutch-Republic-inflected port where the criminal-syndicate-controlled Barrel district runs alongside the licensed merchant houses. Kaz Brekker, the seventeen-year-old lieutenant of the Dregs gang, is offered a heist: break a Shu Han scientist named Kuwei Yul-Bo out of the impregnable Fjerdan Ice Court. Kaz assembles a crew of six (Kaz, Inej the Wraith, Jesper the gambling sharpshooter, Wylan the demolitions-expert merchant son, Nina the Grisha Heartrender, Matthias the captured Fjerdan witch-hunter) and the novel that follows is the heist.

Bardugo's structural method is the rotating multi-POV close-third the genre has built on across the next decade. Each of the six crew members carries a distinct narrative voice and a distinct backstory the novel earns across 491 pages. The Ketterdam worldbuilding is rendered with the kind of attention to the city's economic and political specifics that distinguishes Bardugo from the post-Tolkien fantasy mainstream. The heist mechanics are properly engineered: the actual prison-break sequence in the middle third pays off the setup the front half spent establishing, and the third-act reversal that sets up Crooked Kingdom earns its surprise.

Recommended as required contemporary YA fantasy reading, as the right Grishaverse entry point (you can read Six of Crows without having read the Shadow and Bone trilogy, but the trilogy will be enriched by reading it first), and for fans of Scott Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora and Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth. Read Crooked Kingdom (2016) next. The Jay Snyder / Roger Clark / Elizabeth Evans / Brandon Rubin / Lauren Fortgang / Tristan Morris audiobook (a full-cast production) is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation. The Netflix Shadow and Bone series adapts material from both this duology and the original trilogy.