Six of Crows Study Guide

Bardugo was born in Israel and grew up in Los Angeles, California, where her grandparents raised her. She attended Yale University and studied English, graduating in 1997. For the next 13 years, Bardugo worked in copywriting, journalism, special effects, and finally became a makeup artist. But in 2010, as she grappled with depression following her father’s death, and as she was getting out of an abusive marriage, Bardugo decided to begin writing a little bit every day. The result was her debut novel, Shadow and Bone, which went on to become an international bestseller. Bardugo followed Shadow and Bone with two more novels following the protagonist’s story, and then two duologies (including the Six of Crows duology) that take place in the same fictional world. Today, Bardugo is one of the most popular authors of young adult fantasy novels, and she was heavily involved in Netflix’s adaptation of her Grishaverse novels into the TV series Shadow and Bone.

Rather than take inspiration from medieval Europe for her fantasy novels, Bardugo draws from various nineteenth- and twentieth-century European countries and cities to create her world in Six of Crows. Ketterdam and Kerch are based off of Amsterdam and the Netherlands. The Dutch economy prior to the mid-nineteenth century primarily centered around shipping and finance rather than on cultivating crops or producing goods domestically. Fjerda is based on Scandinavian countries in terms of its geographic features, while the drüskelle cause and culture more closely resemble Nazi Germany. As with the drüskelle goal of eliminating Grisha, the Nazi Party sought to eliminate “undesirable” classes of people, most notably Jewish people but also, among others, those who were gay or disabled. And like the drüskelle (though on a much larger scale), Nazi Germany also used forced labor, particularly to manufacture weapons and other military equipment. The fictional drugs jurda and jurda parem seem similar to the coca plant native to South America, which is a stimulant and was first made into pure cocaine in the mid-1800s. While South American countries where coca has been culturally and medicinally important for millennia insist that coca itself is, like jurda, harmless, cocaine—an analog for jurda parem—is highly addictive.

Six of Crows, the first of a duology (the second of which is Crooked Kingdom), is set in the same fictional world as Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone trilogy. Unlike Shadow and Bone, though, Six of Crows is a heist novel, a genre that sees odd groupings of people pulling off seemingly impossible robberies or other crimes. Other heist novels include The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by S.A. Chakraborty and Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle. In the novel The Great Train Robbery, Michael Crichton tells the true story of what would have been the most famous robbery of the 19th century, had it been successful. Like many contemporary young adult fantasy novels, Six of Crows owes some of its success to that of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, which legitimized children’s literature more broadly and created a huge demand for fantasy aimed at younger readers. Other novels that feature special groups with extra powers or responsibility (like the Grisha in Bardugo’s novels), include Neil Shusterman’s Scythe (the first in the Arc of a Scythe series) and Tomi Adeyemi’s Legacy of Orïsha series. As with the Grisha in Bardugo’s novels, Adeyemi’s series (Children of Blood and Bone; Children of Virtue and Vengeance; Children of Anguish and Anarchy), features oppressed and persecuted people who can use magic pitted against a cruel and power-hungry government.