It’s not every day that you find a novel which combines brilliant fantasy with a heart-pounding heist and the first anti-hero since Ocean’s Eleven who hands down beats George Clooney. But Leigh Bardugo’s new book, Six of Crows does all this and more, making it one of the best reads of 2015 so far.
For those who followed her debut series, The Grisha Trilogy, Six of Crows is a return to the world that so enchanted us first time round; for those who are being introduced to Bardugo through this novel, it is a brilliant entryway into the world of the Grisha on a smaller scale. While it does touch on the precarious political situation that we leave Ravka and her neighbouring countries in at the end of the third book, it mostly confines itself to the antics of a select six juvenile criminals and their plan to pull off the impossible heist.
Kaz Brekker, criminal prodigy, is by the age of seventeen a gang boss’s second with a reputation and the nickname Dirtyhands, as well as an unquenchable thirst for riches. When he’s offered thirty million by a rich council merchant with underworld contacts and questionable motives, in return for breaking into the impenetrable Ice Court and stealing a hostage who could potentially cause the end of the world, of course he accepts.
But he’s going to need help: an underworld Wraith with a debt to pay off; a gang lieutenant who gambles far too much; an exiled Heartrender who longs to return home; a foreign warrior incarcerated for slave trading; and an ammo expert with surprising parentage.
Their journey will take them to the biggest military stronghold of a Grisha-hating country, where the elite witch-hunters gather every year to celebrate the new additions to their ranks. Kaz and his gang will have to sail across dangerous waters, break into and out of a high-security prison, survive a whirl of visiting dignitaries and warriors of the high north, and escape unscathed enough to collect their reward, all in two weeks.
In this book, Bardugo shows her talent as a writer in full, mixing brilliant settings with a heart-pounding plot and unforgettable characters. As the book goes on, alliances deepen and loyalties shift, and the five points of view we are given makes it hard to tear our hearts from the rest to support a single person’s quest. It’s brilliance continues throughout, leaving you at the end with a mind full of questions and a year’s wait for book two.
The Six of Crows aren’t an assortment of people who are going to just wait for fortune to walk into their grasp. No, they’re going to go on a mission that will probably get them killed and might just kill everyone else, while the shifting loyalties of those around them begin to determine the fate of their countries, their people, their hearts.
Together they’re going to burn down the world.
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Buy this book at the Guardian Bookshop
