Six of Crows
Crooked Kingdom
By: Leigh Bardugo
My Rating: Four out of Five Stars
Best for: 16 and up

Sometimes the bad guys aren’t really so bad.

This duology is an Ocean’s 11 style caper, set in an industrial age where a form of magic exists and where bad things happen to good people. The tone is dark, the burdens are heavy, the characters are troubled, and the city is dirty.

In other words, the perfect set up for an adventure!

I loved the heist, the scheming, the twists, the surprises, and all the times I didn’t see them coming. This is a complex story in a complex world told from multiple points of view…and it worked great.

The characters are hard, and some of them they stay hard. That made it tough for me to embrace all of them–a few are not very likable. By the end their redeeming qualities saved the day, and saved my experience.

Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom are really 1 book in 2 parts, so don’t plan on reading one without the other. It’s set in the same world as Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone series…which I haven’t read, but probably will eventually. I was a little worried not reading Shadow and Bone first would be a problem, but it wasn’t. I’m sure there were some surprises in there for fans of the earlier series, but nothing that prevented me from accessing the world.

The story is heavy and dark. Between the two books there are a few instances of strong violence, 2 instances of the F-word, and a couple @$$’s thrown around. No sexual content, although there is frequent discussion of the trauma a main character experience while forced to work in a brothel. There is a gay relationship that is subtle for the first 1 1/2 books, and then gets physical (kissing only) in the last half of book 2.

I say 16 and up.

I enjoyed this 2-book series!

Happy Reading!