A job for thugs and thieves

 For the BSpec book club we decided to read Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows, in part because people have been telling me to read Six of Crows for forever and I haven't gotten around to it. This wasn't even one of those things where people told me I had to read it and I was like "No you can't make me"; people kept saying things that made me genuinely want to read it and then I just hadn't gotten around to it. At least one person made me want to read it by telling me why they didn't like it--something like "It's pretty much just a standard heist story, but in a grimdark YA fantasy world" and I was like HEY, THAT SOUNDS LIKE EXACTLY MY KIND OF BOOK. 

 

Six of Crows is part of Leigh Bardugo's world that has Grisha in it but the Six of Crows trilogy is not the Grisha trilogy; that is a different trilogy that I have not read yet. I'm not sure what it's about, only that it has very pretty covers. I do know what a Grisha is now, though! Unsurprisingly, it is this particular fantasy universe's kind of person with magic powers. There are a couple different classes of Grisha with different kinds of powers, and in some countries they are treated as normal or revered, and in at least one other country they are considered abominations of nature and targeted for genocide. Yeah, this is not a light and fluffy sort of heist story, this is a very intense sort of industrial-revolution-y urban fantasy that's unrelentingly violent and doesn't skimp on the, ah, quality of life issues that plagued either the respectable urban merchantry or the slums and criminal demimonde of rising capitalist trade centers. The main setting in this book, Ketterdam, is a sort of Netherlands-flavored port city characterized by absolute ruthlessness at every turn.

 

The heist here involves a crew of young gangsters from Ketterdam, led by Kaz Brekker, 17-year-old criminal prodigy and utterly broken human, traveling into the heart of Grisha-genociding, Nordic-flavored Fjerdan to "liberate" a scientist who has invented a terrifying drug that turns Grisha's powers up to unimaginable levels before quickly consuming them with addiction and killing them. Kaz and his gang of young misfits, known as the Dregs, were hired for this job by a local merchant of unimpeachable respectability, who, like most highly respected powerful gentlemen in fiction and entirely too many highly respected powerful gentlemen in real life, turns out to be a callous scumbag, but I get ahead of myself. Anyway, Mr. Respectable Merchant Man hires them to bring the scientist to the city council for the princely sum of 30 million kruge, which I'm guessing has got to be at least twice that in dollars. 

 

This being a heist book, I can't really talk about the plot at all without running up against massive spoilers, but suffice it to say it is a prison break type of heist, which is pretty cool. The entity they are prison breaking is literally circular and in layers, for maximum satisfying obstacle-course-ness. Things are carefully planned and then do not go quite as planned, just as one would hope. Overall it's a very satisfying set of clever heroics with high stakes, just as one would want.

 

The real draw here is that this is a very, very character-driven story! There are a lot of heist books where I don't give a fuck about the thieves' tragic backstory that drove them to a life of crime etc., I just want Debbie Ocean to steal the jewels, nobody cares about your shitty ex-boyfriend. This is very different. All the characters on the main heist crew have intense backstories of highly unique trauma and very distinct personalities, either naturally occuring or shaped by the horrendous bullshit life has flung at them, and most of them are good people under there somewhere, although they all have very different and complex relationships to their good selves. There are multiple viewpoint characters--five of the six people on the heist crew--and I can't even pick a favorite.

 

I think it'll be a fun discussion on Sunday.