Review: Six of Crows

I love heist novels. I haven't read a lot of them. I think the fourth novel in Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamourist Histories might have been the first one. After that I delved deeply into the Gentleman Bastard series by Scott Lynch and never looked back. I'll be hones though I think this is a genre that's incredibly tough to get right. Managing the reader's knowledge without feeling like the author is being intentionally withholding, make pacing in these stories a razor thin endeavor. 

Six of Crows succeeds at every page. The movement of the story and the evolution of the plan to break into the Ice Court is some of the most compelling reading I've had in recent years. Layer that with a world of breath taking scope, already fleshed out in a previous series, that creates something with an excellent fantasy world and a plot that has a lot of fun walking through it. 

The spreading lives of the characters interweaves itself powerfully through the intricacies of the plot. The result is a novel that I'd suggest to just about everyone. I would say that this is a novel that scritches and scratches at the edges of Grimdark. There's a lot of violence and some of it rather gruesome. However, there's none of the intimate violence or visceral gore that I'd associate with that genre. It's my only reservation in making a recommendation on Six of Crows.

Six of Crows receives five stars out of five.