Book Review: Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

Let me start by saying, when this book came out, I had no intention of reading it. As far as I was concerned after the rubbish pit that was Siege and Storm, I didn’t even have any interest in finishing The Grisha Trilogy, despite owning Ruin and Rising. But, after seeing so many people rave about it on Tumblr. I finally decided to give it a go. And I’m pretty glad I did.

What’s it about: A crew of loveable criminals attempt a seemingly impossible heist. And there’s magic!

“A gambler, a convict, a wayward son, a lost Grisha, a Suli girl who had become a killer, a boy from the Barrel who had become something worse.”

What I thought: I must say that it wildly exceeded my expectations. So much so that I am now considering reading Ruin and Rising. The lovable characters are definitely at the forefront of this novel, and each is given a nice amount of complexity and backstory as the novel changes perspective each chapter.

And that brings me to the changing perspective. Not once did I emit a squeal of frustration when the perspective changed. It was done surprisingly well. The perspective, especially in the first half of the novel, almost feels as if it’s passed along by contact between the characters. Like one character is interacting with another character, then once that interaction is over, the first character passes the perspective along to the other, and we continue on our merry way. Each character is different and extremely likeable, which made switching perspectives enjoyable. There was an evenness to the interest level of each perspective. No perspectives overpowered any others. I think pulling off a multiple perspective book can be difficult, and if not done well it can completely ruin a book, but I cannot fault how it was done here.

There were some things that happened along the heist that when looking back, the pieces fall into place perfectly as one would often expect in a heist novel. I think that the pieces could have been put together with much more surprise and cleverness and there was some predictability to the way things unfolded. About halfway through I could already pick many of the twists at the end of the book, but that didn’t really reduce my enjoyment of it as there were some things that I just did not see coming.

Overall, I thought this was a great book and I will definitely be picking up my copy of the next book (it is a duology) the day it is released.

I rate it 4.5/5 stars. 

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Find it here: Goodreads. The Book Depository. Amazon.

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