Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1) (Grishaverse, #4)

by Leigh Bardugo

[Nessa Luna]

Reread Mar/Apr 2020: I am feeling all the feelings and I love these characters so much.

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I first found out about the Grisha trilogy thanks to Lauren DeStefano, an author I follow on twitter (even though I still haven't read any of her own books, I am so sorry Lauren). I decided to buy the first book Shadow and Bone and completely sold my soul to this series. When it was announced Leigh Bardugo would be writing a companion series in the same Grisha world, I got super excited! A couple of days ago I finally got my hands on the first book in the series called The Dregs; Six of Crows. And oh my gods, it is amazing!

Six of Crows is about a group of six (hence the title) people - thugs, criminals, assassins - who get the heist-deal of a lifetime. If they manage to do this, they'll be rich - very rich. But in order to make it happen, Kaz Brekker needs the perfect team.

I honestly loved this story. Mainly because the characters are all from Ketterdam - which is a city based on Amsterdam, according to the author. So yeah you had some dutch influences. There were characters with Dutch (last)names, including Van der Poel and DeWinter. Ketterdam was full of canals, and there were houseboats which you see in Amsterdam (and other cities of course) a lot. At some point they ate Hutspot, which is a Dutch meal we eat a lot during winter (basically; potatoes, carrots and onions mashed together, it's nice (but I don't like onions so I eat it without those)).

There were six main characters in this story, so there were six POV's. I liked it in this book, because we got to see multiple sides of the story - which was probably necessary for a story like this. Because the team got split up several times in the book, and it's be a lot more boring if it was only told from Kaz' point of view, for example. Out of those six characters, I liked the girls - Inej and Nina - the best. They were just so amazing, and bad ass and oh my gods I just love them okay. Out of the guys I guess I like Jesper the best, because he's just so in love with his guns and yeah I just didn't really like the other three guys that much. Kaz was both cool and annoying - he was so interested in the money and it seemed almost as if he didn't care whether his team made it out alive or not.

Matthias was just too invested on revenge that I just - I don't know I just didn't like him. Until he did something near the end of the book that made me respect him more. And Wylan - well we didn't get any chapters from his POV, so we didn't get to know him as well as the other characters, which was such a shame - because I think I may have liked him more if he'd had any POV chapters. Maybe he'll get some in the next book, I don't know?

There were also some 'ships' in this book, one of them very obvious from the start, and the other (two?) weren't that obvious but I still liked them. I'll be using a spoiler tag, just in case. The first, obvious, one was Nina and Matthias. That ship was already very obvious right from the start, and yeah I didn't really ship them much throughout the majority of the book, but at the end I was very happy with it. Then there were Kaz and Inej and I did really like them from the moment I started to realise that was happening. I just never had expected Kaz to feel something for her, oh well. And then there were Jesper and Wylan - and I am not sure if Leigh meant for that to be a ship, but I kind of just felt as if they were becoming a 'thing'. Maybe something will happen in the next book?

There were some small mentions to the Grisha trilogy, mostly talking about the Ravkan Civil War and Nina thinking back to her days as Grisha soldier at the Little Palace. I really enjoyed reading about those, because yeah I just love that series so much! Personally, I think you don't really have to have read the Grisha Trilogy in order to read this book, but you probably just should because it's an amazing series! And then you'll know exactly what the Ravkan Civil War was.

So yeah, Six of Crows was an amazing book, full of Dutch references and Grisha trilogy references. The characters were amazing with amazing backstories, the writing is amazing - everything about this book is amazing! If you want to read a cool heist story (like Now You See Me for example, the first heist movie that pops into my head), you should definitely read this book!

My opinion on this book in one gif: