Six of Crows

Published in 2015, Leigh Bardugo’s young adult fantasy novel Six of Crows, the first in a two-part series, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, VOYA, and Kirkus Reviews. A fantasy heist story, the novel shifts between the alternating points of view of five teenagers who team up to pull off the ultimate prison break.

Six of Crows begins in Ketterdam, an invented version of 17th-century Amsterdam, and the novel’s main characters hail from the seedy criminal district known as the Barrel. A people known as the Grisha, who originated in Ravka (the text’s version of Russia), possess magical powers.

Plot Summary

Seventeen-year-old Kaz Brenner or “Dirtyhands,” leader of the Dregs gang, is abducted by a merchant with a business proposition. The merchant tells Kaz of a new drug called jurda parem that, when ingested by Grisha, amplifies their existing power. Jurda parem is extremely addictive, and Van Eck fears governments could potentially control Grisha with the promise of more parem while using the Grisha’s augmented powers to wage disastrous wars. The man who invented jurda parem, a scientist from Shu Han named Bo Yul-Bayer, is being held in the Ice Court, an impenetrable fortress in Fjerda.

Van Eck wants Kaz to break Yul-Bayer out of prison, so the scientist won’t share the formula for parem with foreign governments.