Book Review: Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo

Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo

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Series: Six of Crows #2
Release date: September 27^th 2016
Rating: I heart this book SOOOOO much

This book. THIS BOOK.  Let me just have a moment of silence for how much I love it.  *sigh *hugs book kindle to chest.  I loved Six of Crows (review here) and I was a slightly skeptical that the magic would carry on to a second book.  As the first book ends on a cliffhanger a subpar second book would have ruined the first book.  Or am I the only one that thinks that way?

I am going to try to make this as spoiler free as possible but there might be spoilers for Six of Crows  if you haven’t read that.   Crooked Kingdom starts up a week after Six of Crows left off.  Again there are alternate narrators (this time Wylan gets a chance!) and again there is plotting madness.  Leigh Bardugo has a way of tangling up the stands of narrative so badly that you become convinced that she is never going to get them all tied off in the end.  And yet… She also has a way of casually ripping your heart out.  Be prepared.

I loved all six of the main characters so much.  Wylan Van Eck journey in this book was wonderful to see.  I love how he slowly started to realize how smart and capable he really was.  Inej  is probably the character that changes the least.   She was always grounded in who she was and in this book she is able to connect back to the child she was before she was kidnapped by slavers.  Jesper’s development was surprisingly powerful for a character that is always ready to joke around.  Nina grow up and Matthias starts to figure out that getting over hate is a much difficult than just wanting to get over it.   would basically read about Kaz Brekker doing anything.  He is that awesome.  The one small gripe with the book is that his POV takes over a hundred pages to show up. Kuwei just sat there being adorable.

And the characters as couples?  Even better. Jesper and Wylan are so cute and sweet.  I love how they bolstered one another’s confidence.  Nina and Matthias…*SOB. And Kaz and Inej deserve to be happy together after all the emotional pain that they have to go through to be with one another.

This book takes place entirely in Ketterdam so we really get to see and know the city.  It is a character in the book in its own right.  I love the visceral relationship that all of the main characters have with the city.  The city comes to represent who they were in the past as well as who they could become.

This is a long book but I didn’t really realize it until I looked it up on Goodreads just now.  It is over 500 pages but I didn’t feel as if anything was hammered into the ground or as if anything was becoming repetitive. The ending was everything that I ever could have wanted.

I KNOW that I am going to be rereading these many times in the future.  And also shilling them ‘til the cows come home.  Sorry Not sorry.

“No mourners, no funerals.”