THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS 
 Do you like life, Rollins? 
 Crooked Kingdom follows the journey of Kaz Brekker and his crew as they try to survive in Ketterdam with its increasing dangers and threats. 
 This book has a wonderful plot. Every scene is carefully written and plotted and wonderfully executed. The characters are wonderfully developed and beautifully constructed. Everything is three dimensional and very real. We follow the journey of crew members Kaz, Inej, Nina, Matthias, Wylan, Jesper and Kuweii as they attempt to get their revenge at merchant Jane Van Eck for double crossing them. 
 You know these books you read and feel as if it's a movie - as if everything's playing out in front of you? Crooked Kingdom was totally one of these books. 
 A new kind of misery entirely--Brekker, his Wraith queen, his rotten little court of thugs. A fearless breed, hard-eyed and feral, hungrier for vengeance than for gold. 
 I love and admire the way Bardugo has fleshed out her characters. No character is left behind or neglected. You read in the perspectives and you see everything - the demons, the strengths, the weaknesses, the desires, the fears... everything is shown beautifully. 
 This book is very different from the usual group of YA. In fact, you won't realise this is YA as you read it. There are no usual cliches, no flat characters, no brooding bad boys with tragic pasts put in just to evoke sympathy from the girl. The pasts are real, the demons are real, the trauma is real, everything is real. That's the beauty. If you didn't know better you would say that this world actually exists, these people actually exist. 
 The Grisha world is fleshed out beautifully. Everything is there: the language; lands; people; culture and flaws. The interesting thing I noted here is that Bardugo has subtly but clearly picked up the flaws of today's society and woven them into her world. The judgemental Frejans, the corrupt Kerch, the greedy Shu... It was subtle and beautiful. Major issues in the society were woven in and left for quiet contemplation. 
 The character development here was the best character development I've ever seen. All the characters, whether protag or antag, grew in some subtle, human way. This shows one such example: 
 "Have any of you wondered what I did with all the cash Pekka Rollins gave us?" 
 "Guns?" asked Jesper. 
 "Ships?" queried Inej. 
 "Bombs?" suggested Wylan. 
 "Political bribes?" offered Nina. They all looked at Matthias. "This is where you tell us how awful we are," she whispered. 
 Wonderful. I laughed when I read that. 
 Like every good YA novel, this had its own share of romance and ships. Damn, did Leigh not go all out on that? I can't count the number of times I squealed out loud, fangirling like crazy! If I really think of this, this is the first book which made me fangirl like that. And then there was that scene between Kaz and Inej in the bathroom... oh my god! Ahhhhhhhh! It was so sweet the methods Kaz used to show his affection! :DDDD And Jesper and Wylan were the best! Nina and Matthias were so adorable! So sad about Matthias, man. I loved that guy. 
 Nina glanced from Inej to Kaz and saw they both wore the same expression. Nina knew that look. It came after the shipwreck, when the tide moved against you and the sky had gone dark. It was the first sight of land, the hope of shelter and even salvation that might await you on a distant shore. 
 "You're stupid about a lot of things, Wylan, but you are not stupid. And if I ever hear you call yourself a moron again, I'm going to tell Matthias you tried to kiss Nina. With tongue." 
 Wylan wiped his nose on his sleeve. "He'll never believe it." 
 "Then I'll tell Nina you tried to kiss Matthias. With tongue." 
 "Meeting you was a disaster." 
 She raised a brow. "Thank you." 
 Djel, he was terrible at this. He stumbled on, trying to make her understand. "But I am grateful for that disaster. I needed a catastrophe to shake me from the life I knew. You were an earthquake, a landslide." 
 "I," she said, planting a hand on her hip, "am a delicate flower." 
 "You aren't a flower, you're every blossom in the wood blooming at once. You are a tidal wave. You're a stampede. You are overwhelming." 
 And the best thing in the entire book was the element of surprise woven in. Those scenes of surprise, which made me gasp and then laugh in awe were the best thing in the entire book. Those scenes where you realise that everything was part of Kax's ulterior plan were so cool! They made me love him all the more. And Inej's scene, in the end, was beautiful. The crow in the kid's hands? Oh my god. 
 My favourite scene was Pekka and Kaz's ultimate confrontation. It was so ironic that Rollins did not remember Jordie's name. Thinking of Jordie, it was so epic when Kaz called Jesper Jordie! Man, I was stunned. 
 And then there's this scene: 
 "The blood you spill is the blood of kings," seethed Dunyasha. "You are not fit for such a gift." 
 Inej almost felt sorry for her. Dunyasha really believed she was the Lantsov heir, and maybe she was. But wasn't that what every girl dreamed? That she'd wake and find herself a princess? Or blessed with magical powers and a grand destiny? Maybe there were people who lived those lives. Maybe this girl was one of them. But what about the rest of us? What about the nobodies and the nothings, the invisible girls? We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary. That was how you survived when you weren't chosen, when there was no royal blood in your veins. When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway. 
 Inej raised a brow and slowly wiped the blood of kings on her trousers. 
 In case you didn't realise already, this was read on Kindle, so yeah. Haha. I loved that paragraph, man. I could relate to it so damn much. 
 Last but not the least, if you're looking for a good read, read Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom. you won't forget it, and you'll certainly not regret it. 
 And maybe, in the quiet hours, he'd raise a glass to the men like him, to his fellow architects of misfortune who had helped raise Brekker and his crew. He'd drink to the whole sorry lot of them, but mostly to the poor fools who didn't know what trouble was coming. 
 Welcome to the world of the Grisha.