67 pages • 2 hours read
Leigh BardugoCrooked Kingdom: A Sequel to Six of Crows
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Search for Home and Family
By the time the novel begins, the six main characters have all lost their homes. Some of them lost loved ones to war and disease, and others were forced from their homes. Only Jesper chose to leave his home and his loving family, but the pressure he felt to hide his Grisha identity in Novyi Zem influenced that decision.
Cast adrift from their original homes, the Dregs struggle to find their place in the world and choose to become a family for one another.
This process varies from character to character and is not always easy or straightforward. Jesper is grateful to find “a home and a family in the Dregs when Ketterdam might have swallowed him whole” (471). By contrast, while Kaz assembled the crew, his layers of armor often bar him from expressing his attachments to them. His care for his friends instead shines through in the tenacity with which he fights to protect them and help them achieve their dreams. Wylan’s journey presents another variation on the theme. He originally sees his membership in the Dregs as a means to an end—a way to protect himself from his father until he can flee Ketterdam. Nearly losing his friends makes him realize that he would choose them again “even if he’d had his pick of a thousand companions” (324). Inej also has plans to leave; she spends much of the novel seeking to escape Ketterdam and begin hunting slavers on the high seas, but she eventually embraces the city as her home.
The Dregs grow and transform because of the bonds between them. For example, Matthias’s love for Nina gives him the strength to reject the prejudice that he learned among the Grisha hunters, and he uses his final breath to tell Nina that she is his home. When Nina says her goodbyes to her friends in Chapter 42, she believes that they are destined to see each other again because of the big and small ways in which they have saved each other. The Dregs literally save one another’s lives, but they also rescue one another from despair and loneliness.
Thanks to their time with the Dregs, several of the main characters regain the homes and families that they feared lost. The auction scheme helps Jesper save his family farm and reconcile with his father. Colm’s suggestion that Jesper meet his “mother’s people” means that Jesper will not have to hide his true self when he returns home to Novyi Zem. The plan’s success also allows Wylan to take possession of the Van Eck estate and free his mother. The reclaimed mansion becomes a home for Jesper too, showing that he is part of Wylan’s family now. Nina’s work on the auction scheme earns the Ravkan king’s favor, and he welcomes her back home. Matthias does not live to see his beloved homeland again, but he dies believing in “a Fjerda worth saving” (495). Kaz helps Inej reunite with her parents at the novel’s end, and he takes comfort in knowing that Inej will never give up on her home in Ketterdam or on him. The bond between the Dregs shows that families are built through love and loyalty, not just blood, so it is fitting that the characters recover their childhood homes through their friendship with one another; within this context, those childhood homes also become homes and families of choice, and they are more significant for it.
The Struggle for Revenge and Redemption
Kaz and his crew seek justice for the wrongs they suffered, but they must answer for their own actions to gain redemption. Most of the plot focuses on the six main characters’ efforts to avenge themselves against Van Eck after the merchant betrayed them and kidnapped Inej at the end of Six of Crows. The crew’s exceptionally thorough revenge sends Van Eck to prison, destroys his reputation, awards his wealth to the son he tried to murder, and restores Wylan’s mother to her rightful home.
Of course, the Dregs want more than vengeance; they also fight to atone for their wrongdoings. Jesper’s gambling hurt his friends and his family, and he works to confront the underlying causes of his addiction. By the end of the novel, he redeems himself by saving his father’s farm from foreclosure and by taking concrete steps to manage his inclination toward risk. Matthias also yearns to redeem himself. He tries to atone for the years he spent hunting Grisha by protecting Nina, unlearning his prejudices, and trying to reach the other drüskelle. In the eyes of Nina and their friends, Matthias succeeds; they remember him as an honorable and courageous man whom love changed for the better. Symbolically, Inej faces her crimes and proves that she is stronger than the weight of her sins by defeating her shadow, Dunyasha.
Unlike his friends, Kaz considers himself beyond redemption. The world held no mercy for Kaz when he was a penniless orphan whose only sin was “being the kind of gullible, trusting boy who believed someone might simply want to be kind” (477), and he doesn’t expect to find any now that he is a criminal mastermind with blood on his hands. Ever since he was nine, Kaz dedicated his life to “the painstaking task of pulling Pekka Rollins’ life apart piece by piece” (182). Inej helps Kaz see that his quest for vengeance twists him into a copy of the man he most despises, and she offers him a way to earn the redemption he doesn’t feel he deserves. By making Rollins flee Ketterdam forever at the end of the novel, she frees Kaz from the burden of being Rollins’s shadow. At the novel’s end, Inej and Kaz concoct one last daring scheme together: the eradication of human trafficking in Ketterdam. Revenge is a powerful motivator, but healing comes through redemption.
The Making of Monsters
The theme of the making of monsters shows the power of labels and narratives. When characters use the word “monster” to describe other people, the label inflicts lasting damage. The drüskelle’s leaders claim that Grisha are abominations against the Fjerdan god and exploit their followers’ pain to foster prejudice. Matthias knows from experience that “[f]ear is how they control” people because they used the deaths of Matthias’s family at the hands of Grisha to teach him hatred (487). Matthias now recognizes Grisha as equal human beings and sees how both Fjerda and Ravka perpetuate a cycle of violence. However, even though Matthias loves Nina and devotes his life to protecting her, he must fight instinctive thoughts that say Grisha are “unnatural,” dangerous, and the enemy.
Though Matthias rejects his learned prejudice, not everyone does. This hatred comes with real and deadly consequences. In nations like Shu Han, those in power use people’s fear of Grisha to justify robbing them of their freedom and turning them into weapons with jurda parem. The label of “monster” makes the world a dangerous place for Grisha while serving the (often corrupt) interests of the most powerful.
Nevertheless, Kaz finds power by embracing the title of “monster.” Becoming Dirtyhands allows him to conceal his vulnerabilities through violence and intimidation. Ironically, his reputation as a monster also helps Kaz to preserve his humanity. He does not need to enact every grisly plot he concocts as long as his foes—and even his friends—believe that he might. Near the end of the novel, Kaz uses Inej’s genuine horror to sell his bluff about burying Rollins’s son alive. Kaz commits many brutal deeds over the course of the novel, but he often chooses to let the monstrous stories he spins and the fear he inspires do the work instead.
Throughout the novel, other characters add to Kaz’s narrative and draw strength, safety, and hope from his status as a monster. Inej bluffs to Van Eck that Kaz will murder Van Eck’s wife and unborn child if he harms her, knowing that the merchant will not dare to provoke Dirtyhands with his loved ones’ lives hanging in the balance. When Wylan feels helpless, he regains the will to fight by remembering that “the most brutal, vengeful creature Wylan had ever encountered” vowed to destroy Van Eck (223). At the novel’s conclusion, Inej proposes a plan that will make Kaz a monster who inspires not only fear but also change and hope: She enlists his help against those who profit from human trafficking and tells him to become “the thing they all fear when they close their eyes at night” (527). Kaz’s monstrosity shows the power of writing one’s own narrative, while the Grisha’s imposed status as monsters reflects the perils of labels and prejudice. The stories people tell about those who are different from them can cause lingering damage, but those such stories target have the power to reclaim them for their own purposes.
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By Leigh Bardugo
