I noticed one day that my teenaged daughter, alas not the voracious reader that her father and mother are, could not put down Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows, recommended to her by someone else’s teenaged daughter. So, I thought I’d better read it, too.
Six of Crows is sold as a young adult fantasy novel, but I found the constant, graphic levels of violence (near nauseating at times) to be quite adult indeed (my daughter at least was kind enough to warn me). The plot revolves around the adventures of a violent street gang, and the subject matter includes slavery (including the enslavement of children), prostitution (including the forced sexual enslavement of little boys and girls), drug addiction, gruesome torture, and a kind of institutional racism against a certain class of characters. As I read, there were times when I definitely needed an adult.
The authoress has “bard” in her name and, though she is no Shakespeare, her writing is complex, layered, poetic, lyrical, and riveting. The story is certainly as violent as some of The Bard’s plays--I don’t mind pointing this out again for emphasis. Bardugo borrows a page from George R. R. Martin by having each chapter told from the perspective of one of the major characters, none of whom is over the age of seventeen, which might be the reason for the YA rating.
The fantasy world in which the story is set is fairly unique, a sort of marriage between steampunk and standard epic swords and sorcery--a marriage that somehow works. The world is made up of different peoples from different countries with languages akin to Russian, German, Dutch, and something like Norwegian, which adds a foreign yet familiar flavor to the cultural aspects of the book. There are no elves or dwarves (sorry Tolkien fans), but there are magic users called Grisha with powers similar to those found in the Wheel of Time novels by Robert Jordan.
The main character--a ruthless, amoral, thieving thug with a brilliant criminal mind and gift for sleight-of-hand--is a cripple in constant physical and psychological pain--an interesting choice for an anti-hero. Bardugo reveals in her afterward that she too is a cripple in constant pain from osteonecrosis, a relentless and cruel disease. There should not be much to love about this character, but Bardugo manages to make the reader sympathetic for him all the same.
There are many little and big twists to the plot, which I will not spoil here. Suffice it to say that if you can tolerate the violence level, which is definitely not YA but NC-17, and you enjoy fantasy fiction, you will not be disappointed with Six of Crows, whatever your age. I for one am anticipating reading the sequel, Crooked Kingdom, with great interest.
