A review by bluejayreads
Little Thieves by Margaret Owen

adventurous emotional tense
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This seems like a fairly straightforward plot, right? A thief steals the wrong thing, gets cursed, and has to return everything she’s stolen to get un-cursed. It sounds straightforward and doable, if personally difficult for our protagonist. 

Except that there are so many complicating factors that this simple-sounding plot becomes a 14-hour audiobook of surprises, magic, unexpected friendships, and one of the most thoroughly evil antagonists I’ve encountered in a long time. The true purposes behind Vanja’s curse aren’t even revealed until the climax. The back cover leaves out the villain entirely, along with two of the three major characters helping Vanja. 

There is a lot of plot in this story, but there are also very strong character arcs. Giselle got an obvious one of learning how the other 99% lives and how to not be a spoiled rich girl, and I wasn’t sure if I would like her but she turned out pretty decent in the end. Ragne, the half-human shapeshifter daughter of the goddess who cursed Vanja who is attempting to help Vanja undo her curse, learns how to act like a human and how to fall in love. Emeric, the investigator trying to find the culprit behind Vanja’s jewel thefts, learns to deal with loss and discovers some things about his sexuality. 

I saved Vanja for last because, as the main protagonist, she has the most going on character-wise. She has a metric ton of trauma, and her character is one of the best-written descriptions of trauma I’ve ever seen. There’s no “saved by the power of love” or torture porn or anything, she just feels and reacts in a way that had me thinking, “Yeah, that’s just How Trauma Is.” Her path has some steps forward and some steps back (like dealing with trauma in real life), and she gets some stunning character growth as she learns to start trusting people again. 

I love that everybody in this book is just allowed to feel things. These characters have suffered a lot of pain, Vanja especially, and there aren’t any easy answers but the story doesn’t try to give them any. There are a lot of big emotions but the book makes space for those and they’re handled with respect and care. 

Since so much of the story is not mentioned in the back cover, I’m going to limit my discussion of it. That said, I did thoroughly enjoy it. It’s absolutely full of shenanigans, from delightful jewel heists to playacting as a ditzy princess to get out of trouble to the natural hilariousness that comes from pretending to be both the princess and her maid at the same time. This book doesn’t explore the world much, and in many ways it relies on “generic vaguely-18th-century-Europe fantasy” tropes, but it has a distinct German flavor and an interesting pantheon and religious system that elevated the setting far above pure trope for me. 

I’m also going to mention the antagonist, who doesn’t even show up until a quarter of the way through the book but whose threat level rapidly increases as the story goes on. He is the worst, most hateable kind of enemy, the nobleman who sees everyone else as beneath him and those beneath him as less than human, and who thinks his feeling entitled to rule everything is exactly the same as Vanja feeling like she deserves to be treated like a human. He’s an abuser and a sexual predator and so very powerful and I can’t express how much I hate him but from a story perspective he did make a good antagonist. 

I’m leaving a ton out of this review just for space considerations, but I could talk about this book for a long time. There’s so much in this book. Not only was it a stellar story, reading it was incredibly cathartic. I got to see some fantastic hijinks, solve a couple magical mysteries, encounter several gods, tell off some self-centered nobles, enjoy some hilarious one-liners, and fight a seemingly-unstoppable antagonist armed with little more than quick thinking and thievery skills, and I also got to wrestle with some complicated feelings about mothers, face lingering trauma, stand up to past abusers, seize control over my own destiny, and start learning to be happy. 

If you want a fantasy adventure mystery that will make you laugh, this is your book; if you want a cathartic emotional read that might make you cry, this is also your book. Basically, just read this book. 
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