Yay I finished it, I won’t say I loved it ( yet), but I did really really enjoy it and could see this becoming a new favourite of mine in time – depending on the rest of the series and how it fairs on the re-read.

This is both my first Grishaverse novel and my first book by Leigh Bardugo and it did take me a while to get into it as it felt like I was missing some of the back story, maybe if I had read some of the other Grishaverse novel’s I might have understood the world more?

 

On the Island of Kiech we have ‘Dirtyhands’ Kaz Brekker, the leader in all but name of ‘The Dregs’, a street crew up to mischief in The Barrel ( to me I was thinking The Lost Boys from Peter Pan mixed with West Side Story, buts that’s just me). Kaz and his ‘Wraith’ or basically his spy, right hand woman and the lady that he is too afraid to embrace his true feelings for , Inez. Don’t worry though, this is not a love story, well not really, it’s not Twilight that’s for sure.

Brekker is approached to rescue a prisoner currently being held in the Ice Courts  for a handsome fee, for this he enlists his team of outcasts and criminals to pull off a mission that may not come back from. We have:

Jesper, the sharpshooter with a weakness for dice. Nina, the Grisha Girl who uses her powers for good as she try’s to atone for her mistake. Matthias, Nina’s mistake, currently imprisoned thanks to her. and then we have Wylan, the explosive’s guy who doesn’t quite belong with our crew of criminals and street kids.

To be honest I did feel the book was a bit slow going to start with, I remember looking at the cover and thinking ‘well it says six, where are the other four?’ But I think that is mainly down to me not being familiar at all with the rest of the Grishaverse – as until a colleague told me that there was more books set in this universe I was not aware.

I also kept thinking that I was missing information about the back stories of the characters. However, this turns out to be Bardugos style of writing as everything I was questioning did get answered in flashback and the character’s recollections.

Overall I did find this book a little hard to follow, Kaz’ master plans and schemes did often leave me questioning what had happened and how our protagonists were now in another setting but I think that is more to do with my reading and not the writing.

 

I will definitely be reading this again as it is wonderfully complex and I can only imagine how much of a headache this must have been for Bardugo to plan out. As this end’s on a cliff-hanger I will be adding the second book to my ‘TBR’ pile, but for now I think I need something a tad less challenging.

What do you think? Any Bardugo fan’s out there?

Happy Reading

Kate