Note: ARC/PR Copy

Little Thieves is a book I couldn’t put down from start to finish. A rich fantasy world filled with loveable characters that had me cheering along with their successes and fearing the consequences of their failure.

The story centres around our main protagonist, Vanja, sometimes known by other names, such as Princess Giselle or Greta, but I’ll stick to Vanja for this. In short, she’s a bloody awesome character that I loved reading about for 500 pages. It didn’t seem like 500 pages because this whole book was a delight.

Vanja, though, is really the star of the show. For me, good stories are about good characters. And I don’t mean the characters are necessarily morally good, but well-built, in-depth characters with strengths and flaws and backstories that make them real. Vanja has all of this and more. And honestly? Reading from her point of view was a joy.

"The principle is: I’ve already met my emotional availability quota for the day."

This quote happens pretty early in the book, and it’s what sealed my love for this character. Every sarcastic comment or scathing remark had me grinning and nodding along.

"There’s only room in this town for one smug bastard. That smug bastard is me."

For a first point of view story to really work, the character has to be ridiculously strong-voiced, and Vanja is that, and so much more.

And there’s more than that. There’s Emeric, and Gisele, Ragne, Joniza and this whole cast. I could write thousands of words about each character, about their arc, their flaws, the progression of each individual story that all comes into one. I won’t, just suffice it to say, the character’s in this story are perfect.

But, it’s not just Vanja. And it’s not just the characters. The whole story soars well above my expectations. We’re introduced to the world and I was immediately intrigued. There’s talk of gods, of magic, theft and politics. But I also started mildly concerned that I’d have to come back to it later because there’d be too much information for my half-asleep brain to process when I started the book. I persisted, and didn’t regret a single bit of that sleepless night. Margaret Owen does an awesome job at introducing all of this world in a way that doesn’t seem like overload, that isn’t exposition, it just works. Spoiler Alert below, but it kind-of sums up the first few chapters and was why I was at first concerned about information overload.

"I’ve stolen a small fortune, temporarily evaded a prefect, been cursed by a god, and been lectured by my godmothers."

So yeah, a lot happened at the start, but the story truly grows into its own from there and those few events at the start seem small compared to the rest of the story to come. Underneath the fantasy and myth, Little Thieves is a bit of a mystery. The big question, “How does Vanja break the curse?” We begin to see snippets of both the consequences of the curse, and the cure for it, as the story progresses, but the real answer is left to be discovered throughout.

And resolved it was. I loved almost everything about the ending of this book. The bit I didn’t love? That it had to end at all! Yes, the characters had all had their arcs, and it was a satisfying conclusion to the story. I just wasn’t ready to leave these characters and this world.

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Created Aug 08, 2021 at 2:29pm • Submit your own review...