Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, antisemitism (mention), racism, colorism, colonialism

I didn't find myself checking the page numbers hardly at all while reading this book, and that means it's great because I check page numbers obsessively even on books I'm enjoying.

This book is set in Paris during La Belle Epoque, but there's also magic, and it was so beautifuly atmospheric. From hotels to museums to lavish Order of Babel parties, it's a beautiful backdrop to what really makes this story amazing: the characters.

There are six major characters in this story: Séverin, Laila, Zofia, Enrique, and Tristan, who make up our heisting team, and Hypnos, the Order of Babel member who makes them do the heist in the first place and keeps showing up to help even though the team doesn't like him. Séverin, Laila, Zofia, and Enrique are all point-of-view characters (although the narrative is third-person, so the "point of view" is minimal). I adore their dynamics. They're not the friendly-banter type (except for Enrique), but they're all close to each other and you can tell and sometimes there's tension between some of them but it's always so fantastic to see them together and yes. I love them. I especially have a soft spot for Zofia, who is not explicitly stated to be autistic but I totally headcannon her as autistic.

This is a heist book. Séverin got cheated out of his membership in the Order of Babel years ago, and Hypnos promises to get it back for him if he will steal an artifact ... from another Order of Babel member. So the team works on that heist and inadvertently gets mixed up in a much bigger fate-of-society-type problem. Saying any more would be spoilers, but the climax had me blitzing through pages hoping for a happy ending for our team.

There were also some themes of colonialism - not heavy-handed, but just there, both in metaphor and because this is France in the 1890s and there was colonialism and racism there. I think every single one of our main crew is a person of color or mixed-race (I'm not completely sure about Zofia, but she is Jewish, so she has prejudice to deal with, too). The main plot hinges on the fact that two of the Order of Babel houses have taken over and erased the legacies of the other two houses, which is obviously a metaphor for colonialism, but the book doesn't try to shove it down your throat and just lets it be there.

(It's also technically queer, with two cannonically bi main characters, but that's not a big part of the story.)

I only had two complaints about the book. First, the magic system was extremely confusing. Magic objects were Forged, and the Forging process was done by people who had that power, but that power came through something called a Babel Fragment (maybe?), which the Order of Babel is supposed to protect, and also there rings that the matriarchs/patriarchs of Order of Babel houses might be Babel Fragments? It surprisingly didn't take away from my enjoyment of the story, but I'm still not really sure how it all works. The other thing I didn't like was a character's death after the climax, seemingly for no other reason than "you didn't expect that, did you?" To be fair, the character who died was probably my least favorite, but I still liked them and it seemed really unnecessary.

This was an atmospheric book with fantastic character dyamics and only a few small flaws. This is the fantasy heist book I wanted and didn't get out of Six of Crows. I'm not sure if I'm going to read the sequels - I'm worried that character death might throw off the group dynamics, which was the best part of this book - but I might just be hopeful and give them a try anyway. This book was great enough that book two deserves a chance.