Six of Crows (Six of Crows #1)
(4 / 5)
Ok, there is a lot of hype surrounding this one. I was a bit out of the loop as I hadn’t read any of Bardugo’s previous Grisha books, although the first one, “Shadow and Bone” has been on my to read list for a long time.
Set in a fantasy world where a certain race of people called the Grisha have magical powers, Six of Crows is pretty much the story of a heist. Six people come together through Kax Brekker, the leader of a criminal gang, to perform a somewhat impossible caper. A lot of action, adventure and romance follows. I have heard it time and again compared to “oceans 11 meets game of thrones”, which is almost right… Except it didn’t quite have the game of thrones vibe for me. It did have the entertaining one though.
I must admit that for the most part, the hype is warranted. The characters are fantastic. All their backstories are superb, and I found them all to be extremely likeable. The humour was fabulous, the story was exceptionally well done and I did thoroughly enjoy it.
However I did have one major problem with it though. I haven’t heard many other people complain about this, so it may just be me: But how the hell can these characters be so young??? I cannot for the life of me bring myself to believe that Kaz, Inej and the rest of the characters are TEENAGERS! Especially Kaz… It just ruined the whole atmosphere for me, the things that they said and did just didn’t meet with their ages, no matter how much they had been made to mature quickly in their extremely hard lives. If I pretended that they were adults, at LEAST in their 20’s, the story was much more enjoyable for me. Of course I have nothing against teenagers, or the young adult genre. I quite like young adult. But this didn’t feel young adult to me. Also, I listened to the audio version and the narrators reading the story were obviously older, which that added to my dissonance about this. When they were talking about how they were teenagers merely 16 years old, I just kept going “NOPE, NOPE, NOPE! There is just NO WAY!!”.
Other than this major hurdle which I had to keep pretending was not written into the story, I thought it was great. It certainly did have that “Oceans 11” vibe, and I really loved the way all the twists and turns were written. very clever indeed! The only other thing that lowered the rating for me, was it had a bit of a slow start. It took me a good 5 hours to start to get into this book. And 5 hours of an audiobook is longer than I usually get if I’m not getting into it. But thankfully I persevered and it got SO MUCH BETTER! It was just a bit hard to follow all the characters and get into the world at the start. I’m not sure if I should have read the first series before attempting this one to get a better feel for it, but I got there in the end.
I love audio books with different narrators, but holy moly! 6 NARRATORS!??? It took me a while to get used to the voices and figure out what was going on, but it surprisingly worked.
Would I recommend Six of Crows?
Yes for sure! See if imagining the characters as a bit older makes it better for you?? I have the next one on audible ready to go! Might just jump straight in!
I purchased Six of Crows from audible.com at my own expense.
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