★★★★☆ Ocean's Six

Six of Crows

Leigh Bardugo

A couple weekends ago I watched the four heist films Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Twelve, Ocean's Thirteen, and Ocean's Eight. That was good preparation for Six of Crows, even to the trick of including the size of the heist team in the title.

Six of Crows begins with a prolog in which the McGuffin/Secret Formula/One Ring to Rule Them All is introduced. In this case Secret Formula is fairly accurate. It is Jurda Parem, a hopped-up form of the mild stimulant Jurda. Jurda Parem heightens the powers of Grisha, and also is powerfully addictive to them. The inventor of Jurda Parem has been captured by Fjerda and is being held in their most secure fortress, the Ice Court. The Merchants of Ketterdam (think 19th-century Amsterdam) want to break him out (to kill or exploit him -- you decide which to believe). To this end one of them contracts with a leader of the Dregs, a Ketterdam gang, to break him out. The team assembled for the job is

Kaz Brekker -- the Dregs leader mentioned above, the Danny Ocean of this heist..
Inej Ghafa -- AKA The Wraith, a spy, formerly a Suli acrobat.
Jesper Fahey -- a Zemeni sharpshooter.
Nina Zenik -- a Grisha Heartrender, formerly of the Ravkan Second Army.
Mathias Helvar -- former Fjerdan witchhunter, imprisoned on Nina's testimony.
Wylan Van Eck -- Runaway son of a powerful Ketterdam merchant, also a demolitions expert.

Six of Crows is a multiple point-of-view novel. Each chapter is told in the third person from one character's point-of-view. With just two exceptions (the first and last chapters) the point-of-view character is one of the six above. Things go wrong during the heist, of course -- that's central to the heist genre. Each of the characters has a gift to bring to bear. They have to defeat their demons and stretch themselves. Six is just the right size for this fictional team. Compared to other multiple point-of-view novels, it seems like a lot, but it never got too confusing. By the end of the book, you have spent enough time with each of the six to get to know them all well. (Well, perhaps Wylan gets a little short-changed.)

Compared to the Shadow and Bone trilogy (the only other works of Leigh Bardugo's I have read), this felt more mature -- more sure-footed to me. It is not an easy thing to do, to juggle six points of view without leaving the reader bewildered, but I had no difficulty following, I found all six interesting, and I never lost interest.

Kaz walks with a limp and uses a cane and is often in pain because of a badly healed broken leg. I was intrigued to read this in the Acknowledgments

I have a degenerative condition called osteonecrosis. This basically translates to “bone death,” which sounds kind of gothy and romantic, but actually means that every step I take is painful and that I sometimes need to walk with a cane. It’s no coincidence I chose to create a protagonist struggling with similar symptoms, and I often felt that Kaz and I were limping along this road together.

Thus Kaz is Bardugo's unlikely Mary Sue.

Entertaining read. Heist stories can be a lot of fun, and this one was.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

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