Crooked Kingdom

Overview

Crooked Kingdom picks up almost immediately where Six of Crows leaves off, dropping its six point-of-view characters back into the dangerous port city that shaped them. Leigh Bardugo closes out the duology by widening the scope of the first book's heist plot into a sprawling fight for survival, as the crew's earlier success leaves them with new enemies, broken alliances, and a debt that threatens to unravel everything they built.

Told through shifting third-person perspectives, the novel traces how each member of the group responds to betrayal and desperation differently, giving equal weight to their private histories alongside the external plot. The result is less a single adventure than an interlocking set of personal reckonings, staged against a world modeled loosely on nineteenth-century European trade cities and their underworlds.

As the second half of a duology, the book is concerned as much with resolution as with escalation, closing character arcs that were only sketched in the opening volume while raising the stakes of the central conflict considerably.

Craft, Characters, and Context

Bardugo's structure is the novel's most distinctive feature: by rotating among six narrators, she builds a mosaic of motives rather than a single hero's journey, letting readers see the same events refracted through very different experiences of poverty, violence, disability, and prejudice. This approach has made the duology a frequently cited example of ensemble storytelling in contemporary young adult fantasy, and it extends the worldbuilding Bardugo established in her earlier Grishaverse novels into a grittier, more street-level register.

Much of the book's critical and reader attention centers on how directly it engages with the aftermath of trauma rather than treating hardship as simple backstory. Characters carry forward the psychological weight of what happened to them, and the plot repeatedly forces them to confront those histories instead of leaving them resolved offstage. That willingness to sit with difficult material, rather than soften it for a younger audience, is part of what distinguishes the duology within its genre, and it is also the throughline that connects the book's thematic ambitions to the objections some readers have raised.

Why Crooked Kingdom Has Been Challenged

Much of the disagreement over this title centers less on whether it belongs in a library collection at all than on where it should sit and which readers should encounter it first, with critics arguing it reads older than its young adult classification suggests. The novel does not shy away from violence, including scenes of physical harm and threat that arise from its criminal-underworld setting, and some readers have objected to the frankness with which that violence is depicted. Its handling of sexual content and allusions to past sexual exploitation involving its characters has also drawn scrutiny, as has its continuation of a same-sex relationship introduced in the first book, which some challengers have cited as objectionable on its own terms. Taken together, these concerns reflect a broader debate about how much mature thematic material is appropriate in fiction marketed to teenagers, a debate this catalog records as one state and one district having formally raised through a challenge.