Into the Crooked Place by Alexandra Christo – Spoiler-Free Review

INTO TO CROOKED PLACE
by Alexandra Christo

Feiwel and Friends
October 8, 2019

From Goodreads:

The streets of Creije are for the deadly and the dreamers, and four crooks in particular know just how much magic they need up their sleeve to survive.

Tavia, a busker ready to pack up her dark-magic wares and turn her back on Creije for good. She’ll do anything to put her crimes behind her.

Wesley, the closest thing Creije has to a gangster. After growing up on streets hungry enough to swallow the weak whole, he won’t stop until he has brought the entire realm to kneel before him.

Karam, a warrior who spends her days watching over the city’s worst criminals and her nights in the fighting rings, making a deadly name for herself.

And Saxony, a resistance fighter hiding from the very people who destroyed her family, and willing to do whatever it takes to get her revenge.

Everything in their lives is going to plan, until Tavia makes a crucial mistake: she delivers a vial of dark magic—a weapon she didn’t know she had—to someone she cares about, sparking the greatest conflict in decades. Now these four magical outsiders must come together to save their home and the world, before it’s too late. But with enemies at all sides, they can trust nobody. Least of all each other.

The good people at Feiwel and Friends and Raincoast Books provided me with an ARC of Into the Crooked Place in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I was such a fan of To Kill a Kingdom that I only needed to see Alexandra Christo’s name on the cover to say yes to this one. Unfortunately, whatever magic TKaK had, this one wasn’t quite at the same level.

The characters were well done. They were singular, each had their own strengths and flaws. Well-rounded and felt very real. The relationships between all the characters made up a complicated but interesting web. The friend of someone’s friend was the enemy of a different friend, so on and so on.

The magic system was pretty great, too. For the most part, spells were self-contained in physical form. The people using the spells had to carry them around in much the same way a person who uses a gun had to carry a number of bullets. I thought that was really interesting. Actually, I would have loved to have read a lot more about the finer points—the strengths and limitations—of that unique magic system.

Where this one fell short for me was on the plot itself. It sets itself up well, and then it just dies. The majority of the book just kind of drags on and I couldn’t really tell where it was going. There was a journey involved, and what really threw me off was that despite the fact that the journey’s end was stated, there was nothing given to create reference to length of the journey. Five minutes or five months. Without that being established early on, it felt a little aimless.

It’s hard to say if I’ll be picking up the sequel. I’m not going to be running to the book store when it comes out, but the characters are interesting enough to make me want to know what happens to them next.

Fun fact about this post: This review is so late!