YA fantasy isn't usually a part of my wheelhouse, but this was fun. And the places that weren't so fun were properly dragged in the one-star reviews, which gives me hope for the future of the genre.

Growing up, this is exactly the type of story my brother, father, and I would have devoured alongside 'The Bartimaeus Trilogy,' and the 'Artemis Fowl' series. 'Six of Crows' falls squarely in the middle of both of the aforementioned works, so anyone who enjoyed this would most likely enjoy those (Artemis Fowl for the heist aspect, and Bartimaeus for the political commentary and darker shade of fantasy with slightly older characters).

What Worked

~I was afraid when I read about this duology that the worldbuilding would fall into that grating territory of being what I call 'not-England' (or really any 'not-[insert country in the real world]'). That is to say, that it would feel like each setting was a real place with a pale veneer of fantasy slapped on it just to hide poor research. Happily, Leigh Bardugo actually took the time to more painstakingly create a world to populate. In an interview, she mentioned that her inspirations for the city of Ketterdam were Amsterdam, Victorian London, New York, and Las Vegas. You can definitely tell, but in a way that doesn't feel directly derivative.

It was actually quite fun to get to know each new setting and their respective cultures. Cultures that, again, feel reminiscent of cultures readers will likely be at least passingly familiar with, but not very obviously one in particular. It made the worldbuilding sections drag much less and instead feel like the the unfurling of a map.

~Kaz as the central protagonist/ringleader of the group was a great character. Very much, again, in the vein of Artemis Fowl or The Bartimaeus Trilogy's Nathaniel. You want to wring this kid's neck but you enjoy his cleverness too much to ever actually do so. Up against other teenage 'anti-hero' types he's not super iconic, and if you read a lot of books like this, I imagine they start to bleed together, but that's just how tropes go. And in a duology with rotating POV characters in an ensemble cast it's hard for any one of them to get too much depth. Nevertheless, his tragic backstory does create for him a unique shoulder chip, and the interplay between that and the mythos he builds up for himself worked really well to make him feel sufficiently real and well-rounded, and, importantly, sympathetic.

The heist as well, while not breaking any new ground or doing anything unexpected, was entertaining, and even though the stakes never felt too high for any of our protagonists, the twists Bardugo was able to pull off felt void of significant plotholes and realistically could have been thought up by the respective characters.

The social commentary also worked well in the background. It came close in places, particularly in the conversations between Nina and Matthias, to being a bit too simplistic and on-the-nose a la that one song 'Savages' from Disney's 'Pocahontas,' but the themes of subjugation and resistance track pretty well against reality and 'Six of Crows' discusses them in a very appropriate way for the target audience of teenagers.

What Didn't Work

I know that reading YA of any genre is barking up the wrong tree if you're hoping to avoid inter-personal melodrama, but holy moly was this full of it. Easily the most tedious aspect of reading this novel was having to put up with the incredibly contrived 'will they or won't they' subplots. If Bardugo had chosen just TWO of the characters to play out this push and pull between I still would have found it obnoxious for reasons we'll get back to, but all SIX of the protagonists had 'will they or won't they' energy. And it really was to the detriment of their own character development in some cases.

I get it; these people are supposed to be teenagers, and teenagers have a tendency to create barriers that don't really exist even when it's obvious to anyone with a third-person perspective that they like each other. But oh my god, did EVERY twosome in this novel need that? Could not ONE pairing have a different dynamic?

The trouble stems, I think, from either Bardugo's personal inability to recognize that sex and emotions can actually be mutually exclusive or strong friendships can exist between boys and girls (or boys and boys and girls and girls). Just...some sort of variety would have been nice.

Of the three (unnecessary) pairings, by far the one I found most frustrating was between our bad boy in chief, Kaz, and his lieutenant, the lovely and dangerous acrobat, Inej. Everything that made either of these people interesting absolutely vanished every time the focus shifted to the 'will they or won't they' romance between them. Entire paragraphs lost to infuriating pining. And why? Why was there all this pining? Because Inej thought it was stupid of her to like the bad-boy, and because he felt he 'couldn't be the man she deserved.' I could have ripped the book in half when it came down to this.

Bardugo tried so hard to make it more complicated than that. She tried to make it about Kaz's aversion to touching other people (a side-effect of his traumatic tragic past, and woefully under-explored...), but no, in the end, on the last page of book one, he makes it clear that it really was just because 'he was no good for her.'

Inej had wanted Kaz to become someone else, a better person, a gentler thief. But that boy had no place here. That boy ended up starving in an alley. He ended up dead. That boy couldn't get her back.

Thanks, I hate it.

Why, Bardugo? Why did you put me through that for over 400 pages? And, I assume, 400 more for anyone willing to put themselves through the sequal? It's the year of our Lord, 2021 (almost 2022), can we please (I'm begging) PLEASE give the 'bad boy too bad for good girl' a rest? Or just do something new with it. Anything.

Did I mention that I loathed the Kax/Inej 'romance?'

And let's not even get into how phoned-in the last-minute 'Jesper and Wylan are actually into each other' thing was. I was so mad about having to deal with the others that I didn't have enough venom left to care as much as I might have, but this really did feel like 'representation bingo' rather than an organic revelation. I suppose it could be argued that they started off pulling each other's pigtails before evolving to catching feelings, but something in this transition felt performative and lazy.

A lot of this probably could have been solved or at least made less tedious if one or two of the POVs had been cut. There were very few instances where we needed Jesper's perspective, for instance, or even Matthias's. Jesper was almost always in the same room as at least one other POV character, so he added nothing, and having Matthias as a POV character knocked a ton of tension out of his relationship with Nina. If we had only seen him through her eyes there would have been actual ambiguity regarding his loyalty to the group and to her, and this would have raised the stakes when they actually made it to his home country. But because we have so many chapters from his point of view, we know exactly where his loyalties lie and what he's ultimately going to do, so there was no real chance of him being a double-agent.

TL;DR
As is typical of novels with multiple POV characters, there felt like one or two too many which knocked a lot of otherwise natural tension out of the plot in some key places, and even lowered the stakes of the heist overall by giving the reader too much information. The romances were incredibly simplistic and irritating and immature--especially considering that by every other metric these characters don't behave like teenagers.

That being said, the worldbuilding is solid, the magic system is interesting, and the 'Oceans Eleven'-style heist was a fun romp.