This week, I finally started reading Crooked Kingdom, the sequel to Six of Crows. It had been sitting on my desk for months, and I finally snagged some free time, so I picked it up. I'm notorious in my friend group for disliking YA literature, but this was a refreshing change from the tropes that I try so hard to steer clear of.
I guess that's not exactly accurate--I don't hate tropes. They exist because they're well established, and they've worked a lot of times. I hate when tropes are used just because they're tropes. Sure, Crooked Kingdom is about a group of sixteen-year-olds (give or take a couple years) on a mission to save the world, but it's not boring or tired. It's fast-paced, with witty dialogue and well-rounded characters. Some of them do fall into archetypes--for instance, Wylan, the disgraced son of a wealthy father, who desperately wants to prove his mettle, or Matthias, the stolid soldier with an undying loyalty to his country. But they're still engaging characters.
I kind of gave up on sifting through YA lit for a while. For the volume of it that exists, it seems like there's very little that I actually enjoy (no shade, it's just not really my thing). However, this makes me wonder if there are some really quality books I'm missing just because of my anti-YA prejudice.
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