Book: Little Thieves by Margaret Owen
Read From: 7th January - 11th January 2022
Rating: 5/5 stars
Summary: Vanja, the adopted goddaughter of Death and Fortune, was Princess Gisele's dutiful servant up until a year ago. That was when Vanja's otherworldly mothers demanded a terrible price for their care, and Vanja decided to steal her future back... by stealing Gisele's life for herself. The real Gisele is left a penniless nobody while Vanja uses an enchanted string of pearls to take her place. Now, Vanja leads a lonely but lucrative double life as princess and jewel thief, charming nobility while emptying their coffers to fund her great escape. Then, one heist away from freedom, Vanja crosses the wrong god and is cursed to an untimely end: turning into jewels, stone by stone, for her greed. Vanja has just two weeks to figure out how to break her curse and make her getaway. And with a feral guardian half-god, Gisele's sinister fiancé, and an overeager junior detective on Vanja's tail, she'll have to pull the biggest grift yet to save her own life.
THIS BOOK! I was beginning to lose so much faith in fantasy, which a lot of you will know is a go-to genre and a comfort genre of mine. I feel like I’ve read so many books lately, fantasy included, with none of them hitting that top tier 5 star quality and I’ll be honest, I was starting to lose hope and managed to convince myself that I was starting to fall out of love with the genre. For this reason I was apprehensive about diving into Little Thieves, especially because it came VERY highly recommended. I’m so pleased to tell you all that this book officially got me out of my funk and reminded me why I love fantasy so much.
Firstly, I’ll talk about the characters because they made this reading experience so enjoyable. We have a big cast in this book but every character is so incredibly well developed you feel like you really know each and every one of them, and with the found family aspect accompanying this you genuinely feel like they’re your friends (as sad as that sounds because they are fictional after all). Of course Vanja our protagonist was incredible, her character development was amazing but the star of the show for me was definitely Ragne who was absolutely HILARIOUS! Her one liners that weren’t even meant to be funny had me creasing up. I could literally give a full on list with the qualities I loved about every individual character - even the antagonists because I loved how great a villain they were! But if I did that we would be here all day because believe me when I say these characters are out of this world.
I’m not familiar with the original story this book is based on (Goose Girl) so I can’t comment on how Little Thieves compares as a retelling. But I absolutely loved the plot! It had the perfect amount of fairytale vibes through the various different stories interspersed throughout, and this was also really cleverly balanced with a darker and more medieval setting. It all worked SO well together. Even though this book is on the longer side (500 pages!) it never once felt like a drag to read. In fact, more often than not I was thinking about the next time I would be able to pick it up and read some more!
It goes without saying that I obviously recommend and obviously I will be reading the next book when it comes out! I can’t wait to see where Vanja’s journey takes us next but in the meantime I think I need to make a start on Owen’s backlist because I love her writing!