Start with Shadow and Bone. This is contested advice and you will see the opposite recommended constantly, so here is the reasoning. Six of Crows is the better book — most readers who have finished everything say so — and it can be read without the trilogy, since it introduces its own cast in a different city. The problem is what comes after. King of Scars draws directly on both series and does not work as an entry point, and Six of Crows contains offhand references to how the trilogy ends, including who is on the throne and what happened to the Darkling.
So the choice is between reading the weaker books first and having every later reveal land, or reading the best book first and spoiling the series it grew out of. Publication order is also chronological order here, which removes the usual complication. If you have already read Six of Crows and loved it, the trilogy is still worth going back for; you will simply be reading toward an ending you know.
The original trilogy
Shadow and Bone introduces Ravka, the Grisha, the Fold and Alina Starkov, and it is a fast, conventional young adult fantasy. The honest warning is that it is the least distinctive thing Bardugo has written — the worldbuilding is excellent and the plot machinery is familiar. Siege and Storm is the middle book and has the usual middle-book problem of moving pieces into position, though it introduces Nikolai Lantsov, who becomes one of the most popular characters in the whole series. Ruin and Rising finishes it, and its resolution divides readers sharply.
Read the trilogy quickly. It is doing setup work for everything that follows, and it repays that reading later in ways that are not obvious while you are in it.
The Six of Crows duology
Six of Crows is where the series becomes something else: a heist novel with six point-of-view characters in the criminal quarter of a mercantile city, structurally tighter and far darker than anything in the trilogy. Crooked Kingdom completes it. Together they are the reason most people care about this world at all, and they are the strongest argument for having done the setup first, because the political situation they operate inside is the wreckage of the trilogy.
The Nikolai duology
King of Scars picks up after both previous series and requires both. Rule of Wolves concludes it and pulls characters from the duology into the main political plot, which is the payoff for reading everything in order. Reception here is more mixed than for the earlier books, with a good deal of it turning on how you felt about the trilogy's ending.
The companion books
The Language of Thorns is a collection of fairy tales from within the world, illustrated, and it can be read at any point after the trilogy. It is the most purely enjoyable book on this path and it has almost no bearing on the plot.
The Lives of Saints is an in-world hagiography, short and heavily illustrated, and it works best read alongside King of Scars, where the saints matter. Demon in the Wood is a graphic novel prequel about the Darkling as a boy. Read it after the trilogy rather than before — it is a spoiler in the wrong order, and it is a slighter piece of work than the novels around it.
Where to stop
After Crooked Kingdom is a real and defensible ending. You will have read the trilogy that built the world and the duology that is the best thing in it, and the story is complete. Continue to the Nikolai books if you want the political plot resolved and Nikolai given his own novel; you will not have missed a masterpiece if you do not.
Browse more series reading orders if you want another world to start on afterwards.
Follow the full ordered path here: The Grishaverse Reading Order: Where to Start.
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