Into the Crooked Place by Alexandra Christo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
💙💜🖤💙💜🖤💙💜🖤💙💜🖤💙
This was so good! I love this type of gritty fantasy world.
I recently unhauled over 70-books, and during the course of that massive undertaking there were quite a few books and series that I needed to decide if I was still interested in.
The Into the Crooked Place duology was one of them. The overall rating isn’t great, but the synopsis still intrigued me. After I got rid of the books that didn’t make the cut, I decided to just pick this one up. I’m so glad I did!
This is a YA Fantasy story, published in 2019, that sweeps the Reader away to Crejie, a gritty, urban landscape where vice runs rampant.
The characters we follow are all part of the seedy underbelly of this society. There’s a bit of a mafioso-feeling to it. They peddle in dark magic, versus the commodities they would commonly deal with in our world.
We follow four mains: Wesley, a powerful underboss, Tavia, his lead busker, Karam, his muscle, and Saxony, a girl filled to the brim with magic.
There’s a new dark magic unleashed on the streets, think of it as a dangerously high-powered drug, that is corrupting souls to do another’s bidding. It’s wild.
The four team up together to try to stop this plot before it gets out of hand, but this means they’ll need to overthrow the powers that be. This would result in Wesley coming to power, but is that really what would be best for everyone?
This book reminded me so much of Amanda Foody’s Shadow Game trilogy, which I loved. At the time I read Foody’s books, I had never read a Fantasy world quite like that.
Into the Crooked Place is the first YA Fantasy I’ve read since that rivals that sort of magical gangster feel. I’m not sure why this is a setting I enjoy so much, but I ate it up.
I loved learning about this cast of characters. Their relationships were nuanced and I enjoyed their various backstories and motivations. Watching them come together to fight for a common cause was gripping.
There is so much action in this too. A ton of fights and drama. I never felt a lull. It was go, go, go. Towards the end, OMG, I was flying through this so fast and I cannot believe how this ended. I never could have predicted it.
I do see how this wouldn’t necessarily work for everyone, but I think if you’re like me and enjoy stories with this type of vice-filled setting, you could enjoy it as much as me.
The characters were very easy to get attached too and root for. I will be picking up the sequel very soon, because I am so not ready to leave this crew behind.
I need to know what happens.
I’m so glad that this book survived that unhaul and I’m even happier that I finally made the time for it. This one really surprised me!