Reviews with content warning for Sexual violence - Crooked Kingdom

How do you wrap up multiple storylines in a duology? Personally I think in Crooked Kingdom, Leigh Bardugo shows you exactly how.

A cast of six lead characters, interchanging POVs and a clear goal in mind, this book has it all. Before I started the Six of Crows duology, I didn't have any strong feelings about heist-related books, but it was the perfect introduction and Crooked Kingdom is the perfect follow-up and conclusion.

The story picks up where Six of Crows left off

and you see the Crows try to work out how to get back Inej

. The beauty of multiply POVs means you can see each person's thoughts and feelings towards the insane plans they come up with and the desperation they feel at trying to retrieve their friend.

Unsurprisingly, the character development in this book is excellent, building on what we had in the first book. You can see each of the relationships develop (I love them all, no favourites, how dare you) whether romantically or platonically. With the switching POVs, you can get more insight into how each person has changed post-Ice Court and also how they are tackling their struggles.

My heart was torn out by the ending, and I shed tears after tears after tears, and that is always a sign of a good book.

It was so unexpected but really demonstrated how deep the drüskelle conditioning goes and how much work is cut out to change perceptions on Grisha.

I couldn't work out what the Crows' plan was and it really did keep my guessing until the end,

and I gasped audibly when I felt like their plan was all falling apart at the ninth hour,

so kudos of Kaz for being the mastermind that he is and pulling through.

I also very much enjoyed the allusions to the first trilogy in the Grishaverse, and though it's not necessary to read the books before this duology, it is nice to see how the added flavour of the world has been developed for new and old readers alike.

I definitely geeked out a few times. When I saw Genya, Zoya and Sturmhond come back as I do have a soft spot for them.

This was the perfect conclusion to the series, with enough of an ending that the story is closed, but with the hopeful beginnings of what else may happen to our wonderful cast in the future.

No mourners. No funerals.

Content Warnings

david_slack110507's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I had an awful reading slump whilst reading this book and I feel like that may have affected my rating for this book (Even though I am giving it 5 stars, it is more of a just about 4.5 stars because of the reading slump and the reading slump only type of situation) but even with that I still majorly enjoyed this and my reading experience cemented the Grishaverse series and particularly the Six of Crows duology as some of my favourite series of books. If I had been more consistent with reading I would have liked Crooked Kingdom even more than I already do.

I absolutely love the Crows and their dynamics with one another. It expanded on them even more from Six of Crows, particularly with the relationships of Kaz and Inej, Jesper and Wylan, Jesper and Kaz, Nina and Inej etc. It was so fun seeing all of the characters continue to flourish and to expand upon their already established relationships as well as build new ones and it was one of the main things that kept me coming back even with my reading slump in full force. I liked the endings we got for our Crows as they felt both satisfying and open-ended enough to allow for a sequel or for them to show up in other stories like Nina in the King of Scars duology.

The plot, while I don't think I loved it as much as the Ice Court heist, was still very interesting and was not what I expected going off of the ending of Six of Crows and where this book started off as the plot twists felt cleverly planned out and implemented without feeling like they were done to simply progress the story lazily. The last part of the book - Part 6: Action & Echo - was extremely interesting and one of my favourite parts of the boom because the chaos flowed very nicely to make it an unpredictable, fun, and memorable reading experience. Matthias' death was unexpected and while it wasn't extremely emotional for me as Matthias is one of my lesser favourite Crows (though I do still really like him as a character), it was still effectively done and I'm interested in seeing how this will affect Nina's story going into King of Scars.

Overall, I really liked this book and while I do feel like reading this through a reading slump affected my opinion on the book, though to no fault of the book, I think it was very successful and met my expectations on how to end this duology yet left it in an interesting place to open up into another book to make it a trilogy, which I would not be totally against. I'm most likely going to continue on with my Grishaverse binge and read Nikolai's duology with Zoya and Nina, King of Scars, next as well as hopefully soon rewatch season 1 of Shadow and Bone as well as finally watch season 2 for the first time as I've been waiting until I finished this book as I have been unsure whether or not they included elements of this and Six of Crows into season 2 or not.

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