Greed
In Six of Crows, which takes place in the fictional countries Kerch and Fjerda, 17-year-old Kaz leads five fellow gang members on a wild heist to rescue a scientist from a Fjerdan prison. Greed motivates nearly all characters in the novel, both good and bad. But greed, the novel suggests, robs people of their humanity and can lead them to do truly cruel things to others. Van Eck disowns his son, Wylan, because…
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Friendship and Difference
While greed ostensibly motivates 17-year-old Kaz Brekker and his crew to lead a raid on the Fjerdan Ice Court for 40,000 kruge, it’s arguably the group’s friendships, their trust in one another, and their wildly different skillsets that allow them to pull it off. Each of the six crewmembers brings something different to the table. Inej, a formerly indentured sex worker, is known as the Wraith and can sneakily kill adversaries with her collection…
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Trauma, the Past, and Moving Forward
The six main characters in Six of Crows have all suffered immense trauma in their pasts, from Inej being kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery to Matthias’s upbringing as a drüskelle witch hunter, which taught him to ignore his compassion and humanity and embrace violence instead. To varying degrees, every character is haunted and trapped by these earlier traumatic experiences. Kaz, for instance, is unable to stomach touching other people after his brother…
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Identity, Values, and Growing Up
Six of Crows follows six teenaged members of Ketterdam’s Dregs gang as their leader, Kaz, leads a heist on the foreign Fjerdan Ice Court. But while the novel’s plot follows the heist, nearly all of the characters’ personal growth occurs as they interrogate whether to embrace their national identity and values or to instead make choices that take them far from home and help them develop and embody their personal values. This isn’t an…
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