The Grishaverse: The Shadow and Bone trilogy, Book 1 Leigh Bardugo Imprint Fiction, YA Fantasy Themes: Girl Power, Magic Workers ***
Description
Long ago, the nation of Ravka was split in two by a great darkness, the Shadow Fold, creation of a Grisha witch with the power of shadows. Cut
off from its coast to the west and hemmed in by sheer mountains and hostile nations, the eastern fragment of Ravka began to wither, and many began
to speak ill of the Grishas who brought such horrors, though they still enjoy the protection of the King and the Grisha general of the Second Army,
the Darkling, a master of shadows descended from the Fold's creator. He still works to undo his ancestor's creation, but to destroy the Shadow Fold
will taken an entirely different kind of power: a Sun Summoner, bringer of light. Only no such Grisha has ever been discovered.
Alina and Malkyen were war orphans, bonding over the shared trauma of their past, a bond that Alina once thought would take them through the rest
of their lives. Now they seem to be growing apart. A soldier now, Mal makes many friends and attracts the favors of many more attractive girls,
while Alina, a cartographer in training, slips into the background, too plain to be noticed even by her peers. When they're sent across the Shadow
Fold for needed supplies from West Ravka, they don't even make it halfway before they're attacked by the monsters of the dead, dark place, the
shrieking volcra, who swarm in unprecedented numbers to attack their landskiff... until a great burst of light drives the beasts back. A burst of
light that comes from Alina, when she saw Mal attacked by a volcra. The light of the prophesied Sun Summoner.
Whisked away by the Darkling's personal guards and plunged into the isolated domain of the Grishas, Alina is caught up in a whirlwind of politics
and expectations, dropped into a world where she feels even more out of place and with a gift she can barely seem to grasp. Suddenly, the forgettable
war orphan is the hope of all Ravka and the future of the Grishas... but will she save the nation, or be used to destroy it?
Review
In the interest of full disclosure, I saw the Netflix series before I read this. The series was decent, but I had the distinct feeling that a lot
was being compressed and trimmed from the source material, so I picked up the first installment of one of the source books (the other being Six of
Crows, set in a different time and with different characters but in the same "Grishaverse") in the hopes that it would fill in some of those
rushed holes.
Unfortunately, I think I picked the wrong book.
The world here, loosely inspired by Eastern European influences, isn't that much better drawn than the series, with a lot hinted at but only loosely
sketched out and glossed over; the various branches of the Grisha remain maddeningly interchangeable and vague on the page, as do many of the
peripheral characters and locations. It doesn't help that Alina is among the most helpless main characters I've read in some time. She exhibits almost
no agency or independence, mired in her own stubborn uselessness/helplessness, constantly led around and stumbling and failing and stumbling again,
too often being saved by others despite theoretically being one of the most potentially powerful Grishas with a once-in-a-generation power to rival
the Darkling. Some lip service is given to her stepping up to her power, but I didn't really feel it, didn't feel the struggle or the fight, didn't
experience her growth, but rather was just told about it, if that makes sense. An expected love triangle develops (one of several expected tropes that
plays out in expected ways), which does nothing to enhance her agency. (One thing the show definitely got right was switching points of view to include
the perspectives of other characters; by being stuck with Alina, who was rather hopelessly over her head the vast majority of the time, I, too, felt
lost and helpless and forced to fill in blanks around the edges on my own.) Skirting spoilers, the climax has some unpleasant undertones, though
eventually it finally has her stand up (somewhat) and fight back (sort of) on her own, with mixed results. While I may take a crack at Six of
Crows (and will likely watch the next season of the Netflix iteration), I'm not sure I'll follow the rest of Alina's trilogy unless I find credible
reports of her growing more interesting, or at least somewhat less helpless as a heroine. She was by far the weakest element of this book, undermining
what could have been a decent story and setting.
The houses of Ketterdam's merchants may flow with gold and treasures from around the world, but the streets are full of grit and filth and rot. Here,
survival means learning to fend for oneself, to become a predator or die as prey, and among the most cunning of these predators is young Kaz Brekker,
known with some derision (and much fear) as Dirtyhands. A nominal soldier of the street gang known as the Dregs, it's little secret that he's actually
the architect of their rise from a small band to one of the main contenders in Ketterdam's underworld among the district of ill repute known as the
Barrel. As his nickname suggests, there's not a job too dark and dirty for Kaz and his small band of trusted colleagues to attempt - but when he is
approached by one of the top merchants of the city, even he pauses. There is a new drug that magnifies the abilities of the magical Grishas to terrifying
degrees... only to cripple and often kill them from addiction to the stuff. If any country secured a steady supply of this drug, there would literally be
no stopping them, but fortunately just one man holds the formula - a man currently held by the Grisha-hating nation of Fjerda, in the impregnable fortress
known as the Ice Court. Free him, and stop the drug. To be caught is to die, possibly after being tortured by the hard, prideful northerners. But it's not
the temptation of the millions of kruge that the merchant offers, nor any national or civic pride or duty to protect the world or the Grisha mages
from the drug's dangers, that draws Kaz in at last. It's the opportunity to exact revenge against the one man he blames for all that has gone wrong in his
short life... and if he turns a profit on the side and establishes himself as a legend among thieves, so much the better.
Review
After watching the Netflix adaptation of Shadow and Bone, which melded characters in this book with events from Bardugo's previous Shadow and
Bone trilogy about the Grisha mages, I read the titular book... and was disappointed. But my favorite parts of the series were the thieves, and I had heard
very good things about Six of Crows, so even though this is technically a chronological jump (the events of this book take place some time after
the original trilogy's conclusion, for which there are very minor spoilers, though this title largely works as a standalone), I decided to give this book a
try - and was absolutely blown away.
Bardugo's writing has improved by leaps and bounds over Shadow and Bone, delivering a tense and complex magical heist novel as well as a portrait of
broken people struggling to survive in a world that wants nothing more than to keep breaking them until there's nothing left. Kaz and his crew all have blood
on their hands in some form or another, especially by the end, all of them deeply flawed and not always working toward the greater good. Indeed, it's rare
that they work toward the greater good at all; Ketterdam is not a place that rewards optimism or naivete, save with a slit purse if you're lucky or a slit
throat if you're not, and the gilded merchants of the city are every bit as selfish and devious as the lowest street rat. From the stinking streets of the
Barrel to the deceptive glamour of the brothels and gaming parlors to the icy landscapes of Fjerda and the stark fortress of the Ice Court, the settings
reflect the cold and harsh lives and situations of the characters, the unforgiving and often seemingly hopeless situations they find themselves in as their
plans inevitably fall apart. The plot itself starts fairly fast and keeps raising the stakes and the tension with each new twist and betrayal, and nobody,
not even Kaz, is above making potentially lethal mistakes, for all their streetwise cool and meticulous planning and down-to-the-minute coordination. It ends
on something just shy of a cliffhanger, which is about the only real downside in the entire book. Fortunately, I have the second installment on its way, and
it might end up jumping the backlog line once it gets here. After reading this, I'm tempted to circle back and slog through the rest of the original trilogy;
Bardugo clearly grew into her craft, or maybe this was the kind of story she meant to write all along.
After pulling off an impossible job, penetrating the impenetrable Ice Court of Fjerda to extract Kuwei Yul-Bo the son of the man who created the dangerous
new drug parem from an ordinary street stimulant, Ketterdam thief Kaz "Dirtyhands" Brekker and his mismatched crew should have been legends in the
underworld of the Barrel, and very wealthy to boot... but their client, wealthy mercher Jan Van Eck, betrayed them all. Jan even forged a partnership with
Kaz's archrival, Pekka Rollins of the Dime Lions gang: the man who swindled two wide-eyed farm boys new to the big city, leaving one to die and the other to
grow into the cold-blooded, broken young man Kaz Brekker. Now Kaz, the boy Kuwei, the sharpshooting gambler Jesper, the acrobat Inej, the Grisha Nina, the
former Grisha hunter Matthias, and Jan's disowned son Wylan are in hiding, with both the law and the rest of Ketterdam's gangs after the bounty on their
heads. The safest thing to do would be to give up Kuwei and slip out of town, even if doing so unleashes the horror of weaponized, parem-addicted
Grisha upon the world. But Kaz has fueled his entire life with a need for vengeance, burning the dregs of his own decency and humanity to keep the fire
burning. If his enemies thought he'd limp away with his tail between his legs, they've made a potentially lethal mistake, one that might destroy the whole
of Ketterdam.
Review
The first book in this exciting, dark duology ended on essentially a cliffhanger, so I had to grab the conclusion to find out how it played out. Bardugo
maintains the pacing and the dark overtones of the first volume, ratcheting up the stakes and the emotional turmoil. The characters are long past any
naïve notion of Ketterdam being a safe and loving home, but it was their home, and still is, even as every person in it seems bound and determined to
hunt them down and drive them out. Their flaws continue to plague and shape and drive them, and there is no magic moment where they're all fixed and
everything get better; theirs is a broken world, one with only broken lives, and any happiness or satisfaction or even mere survival to be had must be formed
around those broken pieces, using them rather than denying them. Kaz is a brilliant and ruthless antihero, a self-admitted monster who only ever can do good
(or some rough semblance thereof) when it aligns with his own dark drives and scarred history. His crew is the closest he has to family, but he never lets
them make the mistake of confusing need and loyalty with love; they all have personal goals that they're using the others to meet. The plan is twisted and
complicated by numerous setbacks and the involvement of international politics - parem is something that will not be confined to just one nation's
borders if it gets out, the drug that greatly magnifies a Grisha's power at the expense of addiction and early death - but they have one advantage here that
they lacked in the Ice Court, knowing the streets of Ketterdam better than even their enemies. It's a fast-paced story that races along, yet without
sacrificing quieter moments of reflection and growth and self-realization that add emotional weight to the plot. They're all different people by the end of
the story than they were at the start, and all of them know that even this is just a pause on their greater journeys, even if that journey may no longer
include the rest of the crew. The only real drawback to this book is that now I feel compelled to go back and finish off the first Grishaverse trilogy, and
maybe look into the books that come after this, for all that part of me suspects that I'll consider them pale shadows after my adventures with Kaz Brekker in
the streets of Ketterdam.
