Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo

Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo is the followup to Six of Crows, which I wrote about lovingly only a little over a month ago.  But, this has been a long month and my ability to concentrate on fictional universes has devolved to the point where all I really want to do is find a patch of land and lay on the ground and stare at the clouds while my dog races around off-leash and the thought of reading actual words that have actual meaning seems a bit ambitious.

So.

It is impressive that Bardugo held me in her thrall. This duology of Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom is unparalleled in character development, delicacy of theme building, and intense plot development.  I'm going to take these one a time and attempt to convince you that you should put these books at the top of your reading list.

I am not a fan of many books told from multiple perspectives.  I generally think it's lazy storytelling and frequently couldn't tell the characters apart if the chapter headings were removed because it leads to poor character development.  But Bardugo pulls off magic here by building characters with just a few well-chosen plots points and word choices so that you would never confuse them.  Kaz, Inej, Jasper, Nina, Matthias, and Wylan are all people with quirks and foibles and pasts and you just learn more and more about them with each passing page. If you took a page from the book that didn't have the character's POV on the top, you'd be able to tell from reading it exactly whose section of the book it was. It's not like Bardugo did all her character building in Six of Crows and then just skated by in Crooked Kingdom - no, it's an ongoing process that is still going on the last page of the book.

The other thing is that these books deal with incredibly heavy themes.  There's abuse, sexual assault, PTSD, survivor's guilt, human trafficking, sexual identity, and so much more. But the books never feel preachy and you never feel like it's an after-school special and that these problems are solved at the end of the story. You know that there's more and this strange fantasy story is more realistic about human behavior than most of the contemporary fiction I read.  Bardugo is deft in weaving in what she wants you to remember about these themes in a delicate way, gently reminding us through characters' actions or plot points. It's magical how she did it without overdoing it.

This is also such a tortuously plotted novel.  The first part is about saving one of the group members who had been kidnapped and the plot to save her was intricate and complicated, yet completely understandable. And then it just kept going because our gang still had grievances to air and grudges to end.  I was reading The Luminaries at the same time, which was also a complicated plot, but while I took lots of notes on The Luminaries and reread sections, I just still didn't completely understand the plot at the end, whereas with this novel, I was speeding through the pages and the plot was never lost on me.

I've written a great many words here to say that you should absolutely read these books if you haven't already done so.  Bardugo is brilliant and the books brought me some much needed joy in a time when joy can be hard to come by.