A review by natyourusual_
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

adventurous dark emotional slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

Once you reach the actual heist happening and the first major problem in the Ice Palace, it becomes a fun read. Unfortunately, that takes over 280 pages which is roughly 2/3 of the whole book. I should not have to slog through that much for it to get good. Plus, certain characters got hyper-speed development at the end despite having enough page time to get better slowly. Other characters got so little page time of substance that I barely knew who they were until the end. It just felt a little sloppy imo. All of the characters should have been aged up as well. I hated being reminded that they’re literal children because that did not make any sense for their character arcs/backgrounds and took me out of the story. Explanation of my biggest gripe in the spoiler section (and it has some pretty big spoilers):

Okay so I have one major gripe with this book and it’s the Nina/Matthias romance. He is a former witch hunter and she’s Grisha. The horrendous things we see from him and his ilk throughout the story are absolutely disgusting. He’s essentially former gestapo yet we’re supposed to be rooting for him to get with someone he was going to torture and murder on several occasions. Even after they’re into each other and they see the burnt corpses of her people, he has the audacity to say to her “have you ever considered that you were never meant to exist?” Like, I get that he “grows” and realizes that maybe everything he was taught was propaganda and wrong, but he also pulls the “killing Hitler means you’re as bad as him” argument when he stops Nina from killing his genocidal mentor. I just think a lot of that arc was not good and I hated it. Them being friends and him growing and then helping her stop more of her people being murdered by helping her end (read: kill) the main cause of that violence would have been a better arc. No romance, though, ever. I cannot stand this type of romance. </spoiler
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