Review: King of Scars

King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR PREVIOUS GRISHAVERSE NOVELS. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.

I managed to forget Nikolai for the most part after reading the Grisha Trilogy for the first time...but after rereading all those original books, I remember and love him a lot more.

Now I've finally read the first in his duology - well, it's a little misleading to simply refer to it as the Nikolai Duology as GR has been doing. The King of Scars Duology sounds more accurate, not unlike the Six of Crows duology - which, well, it's not the Kaz Brekker Duology for a reason. Maybe it's a little less ensemble in its casting than Six of Crows, but the fact that we get three main POV characters spotlit in the blurb - Nikolai, of course, as well as Zoya and Nina, returning from SoC and Crooked Kingdom - means this really isn't just Nikolai's series, not by a long shot. Nikolai's story does, however, really form the core of the book, as he's struggling to balance the day-to-day of being Ravka's dashing new king with the night-to-night of a curse of a pretty lycanthropic nature, courtesy of that worst of the worst hacky-sack villains of the YA world whose name isn't Umbridge, the Commandant, or Maven Calore: the Darkling.


(Incidentally, in the years since SoC started taking the world by storm and making Bardugo one of YA's most household names, I've been increasingly convinced by the arguments that that series is only YA because it's marketed as such, but makes more sense as an NA if not a straight-up adult fantasy. Reading this book, an experience I found pretty comparable to V.E. Schwab's Darker Shade of Magic, I'm even more inclined to agree. This book really is NA instead of YA; the only reason it's marketed as YA is 'cause y'all let NA pretty much die as an age group outside of the romance genre. But that's a discussion for another day.)

In addition to Nikolai, we get an extension of Zoya's story. Zoya is one of those no-nonsense types whom, I think, is written as a go-to example of a sympathetic protagonist who's nevertheless very hard to like. Yes, Zoya does have a tendency to rub me the wrong way, but her backstory is so unforgettable in the dreadful circumstances she had to face until her Grisha powers made themselves known. And she's apparently Bardugo's favorite POV to write, which doesn't surprise me one bit, let's be honest. That's how you know Bardugo and I are NOT the same person, because my favorite characters are Jesper, Nikolai, Alina, and Mal. (Also, I could be wrong, but I totally read Zoya as ace.) Nina gets a significant POV in this book, the only major returning character from SoC, unless you count the occasional cheeky comments she hears in the voice of her dead love, Matthias. She's on a mission in Matthias' homeland of Fjerda, trying to help stop that country's systemic oppression of Grisha - and discovering the terrifying scale to which that oppression extends.

Again, though, Nina's the only major returnee from SoC, which actually pretty well disappointed me. Not only because there's pretty much neither hide nor hair of my faves - Kaz and Inej get name-dropped a few times, at least, but Bardugo would have you believe that Jesper? Who's that? - but because, frankly, this book seems to be written a little more for fans of the original trilogy than for fans of SoC. This book picks up more loose threads from the original trilogy and, aside from Nina, leaves a lot of dangling threads from SoC - of which I still feel like there are a lot more because Bardugo went in on the duology trend, which still aggrieves me a bit because SoC is an example of the duology feeling like a most incomplete story to me. There's also a lot of - frankly, gross - Darkling fanservice, especially in the form of a "Starless One" cult. I think that could explain why, as far as I've seen, this book hasn't received nearly the same widespread acclaim as SoC did - I'm glad to see that the fandom opinion of the Darkling has shifted into a more negative light lately, though it does make me want to say, hipstery though it may be, that I hated the Darkling before it was cool. A bit of the slightly cooler reception to this book might also owe to it presenting a less diverse image - we're mostly set in Ravka and Fjerda once again, away from the cosmopolitan melting pot of Kerch that brought together the incredibly diverse cast of SoC, and most of the POV characters (save Zoya, who's mixed Ravkan and Suli) are white. I mean, of course Bardugo's not about to skimp on the diversity, but when most PoC are minor characters at best - and Shu Han, in particular, still gets all but unexplored anywhere in the narrative - it does undeniably feel like a step back.

That said, though, Bardugo crafts a very good story, as she always does. A little too long, to be sure, not unlike Crooked Kingdom - I think it could've done with maybe a hundred fewer pages. But our cast of characters really makes it a terrific experience, a book to savor as gently as possible. Or perhaps fast, the way Nikolai might - though Ravka's a land with a tea culture, his international pirate career has rightly made a coffee drinker out of him yet.

But I'd do you all a disservice if I didn't warn you of the ending. I always like to point to the most aggravating cliffhangers as Aveyardian like in Glass Sword, and now I have to append a particular subtype that I sincerely hope to never see repeated by any other author: the Bardugoan cliffhanger, in which exactly the plot twist I was hoping would not happen, did. No spoilers, but for anyone playing at home who knows all my thoughts on this series, you're going to smell it coming as early as page 100 and it'll still burn a hell of a lot by the end.

Whenever we get the sequel to this book, I'm going to be ready to read it. And to light a certain something-something on fire as many times as it takes to destroy that something-something for good.

View all my reviews