Just Finished the Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo. Highly recommended!
The story once jumps between the crews’ points of view, giving us insight into each character’s view of the world, hiding and revealing plot points to some and not others, and – importantly, as a point of difference between Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom – delves far deeper into the lives of our protagonists than previously shown. This, I think, is where Blades players will dig the ebb and flow of the tale – it closely resembles the Score -> Downtime -> Freeplay sequence of playing the Blades RPG.
There is a slight change of pace to the hectic Six of Crows, and the scenes of character introspection peppered throughout provides some breathing time and caused me to be irreversibly hooked, as we found out more and more about why these broken people are who they are. Their ‘vices’ became detailed, their friends and enemies became connected to the story and the eponymous ‘success with serious consequence’ pervades the narrative.
However, the meat of the ‘score’, when we’re not in these reflective moments, the story progresses at Bardugo’s standard breakneck speed. Overall, the story is gripping, reminiscent of Lynch’s Gentlemen Bastards series in nature, but darker, with more broken and engaging characters struggling; fighting to grow.
Cool book. You’ll see the “struggle with your vice”-xp trigger pulled a lot 🙂
I love those books, too. My daughter and I saw her at a signing Friday night and she said we can expect some of the Six to appear in her next Grishaverse book, King of Scars. 2019.
Another note: while Lamora is given as a touchstone, I agree that this series is more Bladesy overall.
Should I start with Six of Crows? Or is it fine to jump in here?
I think it’s better to start from the beginning to know the characters better. BTW they just published a German version of Six of Crows. They even made an animated video … looks very cheesy 🙁
Aaron Berger Def Six of Crows.
Halfway through Six of Crows now. It’s creepy/cool how much of the story I can map to Blades concepts and mechanics.
Adding these to my ‘find and read’ list…
Thanks for this, one of the best YA fantasy series i’ve read to date. Will now have to buy everything Leigh Bardugo makes