Some things you don't get right on your first try, or on your second, or even on your third. Some things just take time and patience. Discipline and control. A calmness at your center and an ability to swear obscenities at a volume no one can hear. Maybe some things need another ten-thousand hours before they start to fall into place.
Maybe you read the Shadow and Bone trilogy, and found three books that got progressively better, but still found them wanting, still thought there was missing something. It was a solid swing, you thought to yourself, it made contact, it connected. It wasn't quite a homerun, but it was in the vicinity.
Maybe you thought the protagonists were too virtuous, too pure, too pristine. Too disinfected, too hermetically sealed, too contaminant free. If only the characters were darker, more interesting, more troubled, more broken but somehow more hopeful, and more complex. If only the setting was more disreputable, the ethics more questionable. In the deepest shadows, in the darkest parts of your heart, you called out to anything that would listen, anything that would make a deal.
You asked and Bardugo answered; hallowed be her name. And now you owe her your soul...or at least the cost of a couple books.
Welcome, my friends, to the Six of Crows Duology.
Ketterdam is a port-city that runs on greed and lust, craven desire and power-mongering. An economy built of equal parts criminality and trade, if there's even a difference between the two. We meet six individuals bound together by unvirtuous means in pursuit of less than virtuous ends. They'll break rules, laws, conventions, stereotypes, your heart and, if you're not careful, your face.
There's a gunslinger who never misses, except when it comes to his gambling addiction, and his knack for losing bets. An indentured tight-rope walker working as a spy. A brilliant chemist, disowned and disinherited from his former life of wealth and privilege. A soldier-zealot turning his back on country and kin for the sake of a woman he had no business falling in love with. A woman with the magical ability to stop your heart, literally, who finds herself desperate and far from home because she fell in love with him. Each, in their own way, trying to survive, to get rich, to get revenge, to make amends.
And then there's Kaz Brekker...
Some heroes contend with the darkness almost effortlessly. They come out the other-side spotless and undefiled. Refined, perhaps. More vibrant for the endeavor. Maybe even more pure.
But some have to claw their way out of the black hole they were cast into. All blood, guts, fingernails, and scar tissue. They come out different. Something comes out with them. Something with horns, and teeth, and wings. Darker than the midnight they fell in. Something even monsters are afraid of. The thing that lives underneath the boogeyman's bed.
Kaz Brekker is cold and calculating. A criminal genius, ruthlessly ambitious and ruthlessly loyal to the members of his crew. Always working an angle. Never without a plan. Always plotting five, six, seven, steps ahead. He's a barbed wire bastard with an armored heart of gold, and he's an absolute joy to read. You won't hate to love him, you won't love to hate him, but you might hate yourself for loving him so much.
For me, Kaz Brekker is proof that human sexuality exists on a spectrum. My status as a standard-issue, cisgender, heterosexual, male has never been suspect, but after finishing both books in the duology...I had questions. If it had been a trilogy, who knows what conclusions I might have come to by the end?
But I digress....
If you're a sucker for a heist. If you love vivid settings and well-crafted worlds. If you relish a good plan, an artful scam, double-crosses, tricky twists and turns. If you need your literature fantastical. If you can't understand how anyone can read a book without at least a sprinkling of something magical. If you enjoyed the Shadow and Bone books, but wished you could see the seedy, underbelly lurking underneath everything. If you need to be reminded that even when you heal, some part of you stays twisted, that you'll always walk with a limp even after you come back stronger from something horrific, that even monsters are capable of being heroic after a few tries, then you owe it to yourself to read the Six of Crows Duology.