In Six of Crows, six characters plan an impossible heist that is both extremely high risk and high reward. Yet Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows and its sequel Crooked Kingdom, which came out this past September, taught me to give myself space instead of hiding. As a queer, disabled woman, I’m often disappointed to find that characters that are like me are killed off, magically cured, or otherwise disposable in the end. Yet despite the way that books have held me up over the years, it’s rare to find myself completely in a book. My mom, like me, was disabled, and it was something that was celebrated in our house. The only place that I really existed, that I let myself expand, was at home with my mom and our books. I made myself small, and left my body-which was shaky, uncoordinated, with muscles that didn’t work like everyone else’s and couldn’t seem to master stairs-to become as nonexistent as possible. That’s what I would do when I was walking down the stairs of my elementary school, one step at a time, hands clutching the handrails, as other kids pushed me out of the way. I could shrink myself down into the smallest physical fraction of my body possible and hide in that space. When I was a kid, I learned not to exist.
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