Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo (2016)

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*Crooked Kingdom is the sequel to Six of Crows and contains spoilers from the first book
It hasn’t even been a week since the Dregs’ successful break into the Ice Court ended in peril and now they’re out to make it right, starting with getting Inej back. But even if they do, there’s still the matter of getting back the millions they’re owed from Jan Van Eck and it’s going to be a very nasty fight to get it back, especially since Van Eck is after the one thing they have: jurda parem. While it be almost impossible for others, with Kaz involved almost nothing seems impossible, even if Van Eck has enlisted the Dregs’ rival gang for assistance. Now all they have to do is put their plan in place.
It took some nerve to read Crooked Kingdom with the size of the book being so daunting (over 500 pages). However, I simply had to get back into the Grisha universe after reading Six of Crows about a month and a half ago. I really loved that one and now, everytime I read a Leigh Bardugo book, I have more regret for not thinking of her as that important since her writing rules.
To write a character like Kaz Brekker, an author has to have a vast amount of wit and a lot of smarts. Luckily, Leigh Bardugo has both and beyond. Constantly, Kaz is one step ahead of Van Eck and comes up with plans that I couldn’t’ve in my wildest dreams. It was unbelievable what he could do, and even more unbelievable to think that Bardugo had to come up with everything Kaz does. However, I noticed Kaz took a backseat for this novel when he was a focus in Six of Crows. In no way was this a bad thing because then their ended up being a lot more opportunity to focus on other characters.
Like the first novel’s title refers to, there are six characters that these novels revolves around: Kaz, Inej, Jesper, Nina, Wylan, and Matthias. While the first book focused on the backstories of Kaz, Nina, Matthias, and Inej this one focused on the stories of Jesper and Wylan. Jersper’s story was really cool especially since we just learned in the last book he was Grisha, something that was even a surprise to him. Slowly, throughout his history, we saw bits of pieces that pointed toward a Grisha background. His dad also ended up playing a huge role in their heist this time and it was nice to see the father-son relationship. On the other hand, I loved Wylan’s story, which makes him 100x stronger than I thought he was. It also really highlighted the cruelness of his father, Jan Van Eck. By the way, Van Eck is about the most evilest character ever and earns himself a spot next to the Commander in An Ember in the Ashes.
The romance in this book was just beautiful. It was such a subtle thing and there wasn’t really any romantic scenes, but sometimes there were hints when a character looked at another character a certain way. It was so sweet to finally see Kaz let some of his guard down with Inej even if nothing serious happened. I also really like the growth of relationship between Wylan and Jesper that happened between the the whole duology.
Of course, I have to mention the world, which was just fantastic. I could fully image where every character was and the surroundings. Also, unlike Six of Crows, I enjoyed the constant action that was packed in this one. I thought there were much more realistic barriers set in place and the story was more believable in general.

Ultimately, a great conclusion to an action-packed duology!

5 Stars

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