Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo: I've waited so LONG!!

Crooked Kingdom 

by 

Leigh Bardugo

I have waited so long for this book to come out!! Oh my gosh so worth it!! I even got it day of with audible credit (which is why I didn’t bother to update my progress on goodreads because it was too confusing to guess where I was) which basically means that I got this book day of for free! I’m not going to be sad for an entire week! 

Except you know . . . sad for my poor characters who couldn’t go two chapters without getting beat up, stabbed, or drowned by vengeful grisha. 

For the love of Pete stop dying while I’m not watching! 

 Okay, okay let’s do this in an orderly fashion with minimal uses of exclamation marks. (Be forewarned that I’ll include spoilers for the first book. But don’t worry I’ll give warning if I’m going to spoil this one.)

Characters (are you ready because there are six of them)

Kaz Brekker 

Evil mastermind who is totally not in love.

 Seriously dude stop telling yourself otherwise.  Kaz was this crabby, limping, completely despicable human being who came up with all the evil, despicable, incredibly clever plans. Which seemed to usually revolve around kidnapping important peoples family members (I think he has a complex after Inej, just saying).

 I loved him because he was broken and sympathetic but I literally would have believed that he’d do anything. Seriously I wouldn’t have put anything past him and that was terrifying. Scheming face!

Inej

 Oh Inej, you are my favorite. She’s the wraith which means that no matter how many locked doors you have you are so incredibly dead.

 Or all you secrets will be known and spread to the ends of the earth while you watch your empire crumble around you. 

Good times. 

Inej was an acrobat but then she was kidnapped at fourteen (I think) and sold as a slave. A very, very not good slave. But she is still fabulous. Her dream for all the cash she gets from her job is to buy a ship and go hunt slavers! I need a side series, a comic book, anything! Featuring Inej in her fake suli silks taking down slavers. The poetic justice is beautiful.

Nina

  Poor Nina! All that stuff with parem was so sad. She was always so sassy and funny and utterly obsessed with waffles and I was so glad when she got better. Even when her version of getting better was to become a necromancer. 

That’s probably not right but that’s my definition and I’m sticking to it. Because there aren’t enough sarcastic necromancers who love chocolate and waffles.

Matthias

 oh I don’t know with this one. Don’t get me wrong Matthias had some great lines and at least he wasn’t constantly trying to figure out how to betray everybody like in the last book but . . . I’m still not overly fond of him. Sorry Matthias you just aren’t as cool as the rest of them.

Jesper

 Sarcasms by Jesper sold here. His narration was always super funny, I loved his voice and his attitude of reckless abandon. His and Kaz’s friendship (if you can call it that) was also pretty interesting because you never knew if they were going to shoot their way out in a fabulous explosion or if they were going to punch each other senseless. 

Wylan

 we got some narration form him this time! Which helped him feel a lot less like a tacked on child character. He is like fourteen right? I couldn’t really find an age in this book (maybe they said it in the first one) but he felt a lot younger than the rest. 

Still I was glad we got to actually see inside his head this time.

The Amazing things!

Scheming face! The plot was brilliant, though a lot less heist-y than the first book which was a bit sad. Every plan had a twist and every execution of said plan usually went poorly and there was blood. And somewhere in the middle they failed, so completely and utterly. That was a bit of a novelty. I mean not that they failed, but that they failed for actual reasons instead of something random. So basically . . .

SPOILERS (for maybe the first hundred pages but I'll give warning anyway)

Can we just appreciate the scene where they kidnapped Rollins’s pregnant wife. I was getting ready to smack Kaz over the head for being a terrible person 

but they treated her so well (mostly thanks to Matthais which is partly why I liked him better this time) and she still managed to be annoying. The signing! So terrible.

Spoilers over.

And can we talk about Kaz and Inej! I don’t need your permission though because Y’all know how rare it is for me to actually like the couples. They were so cute. Even though Kaz continually pushed Inej away which was mildly frustrating, 

But if you have me dancing around the kitchen just because they actually held hands you have done something very, very right.

However on that note

Singular dislike

The other two romances were kind of lame.

Yeah probably

 I really didn’t like Matthias in the first place but loved Nina so they were probably doomed from the start. Their whole love story was just sort of weird . . . and boring. Also kind of disturbing. That princess and barbarian thing made me extremely uncomfortable. I just was so not behind them.

Finally Jesper and Wylan. Can we not? It was just awkward and forced and frankly ridiculous. Plus I’m pretty sure that Wylan is around fourteen while Jesper is closer to eighteen which . . . Ew, 

I’m going to stop here before the hoard of angry fangirls come to get me.

Complaints aside I am still so pleased. I need another one!!!!!!