Book Review: Little Thieves by Margaret Owen

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Genre: Young Adult Fantasy Fairytale Retelling
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
Publication Date: October 19th, 2021
Pages: 512, hardcover
Source: NetGalley

Once upon a time, there was a horrible girl…

Vanja Schmidt knows that no gift is freely given, not even a mother’s love–and she’s on the hook for one hell of a debt. 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.

Once, many moons ago when I was just a baby Miranda, my friend and I were obsessed with a comic on deviantART. It was part of a challenge where several different artists created characters and storylines set in a world that the person in charge of the challenge had created. Week by week, the artists would post their own comics, and people would vote on which story and characters could go through to the next round.

My friend and I loved the storyline following two outlaws, Annie and the Professor (or as Annie called him, Ginger.) It was hilarious, the characters were well crafted, and the storyline was moving. I loved it so much, in fact, that I followed the artist for the next fifteen years, because I wanted to see what else she would eventually put out.

The artist was Margaret Owen, and I am so excited to be able to read her books.

Little Thieves is a loose retelling of The Goose Girl but focused on the villain of the story, the maid who steals the princess’ life. When Vanja steals something she shouldn’t and is then cursed by a Low God to repay her debt, she has only two weeks to break the curse before she turns to jewels.

To say this book is a triumph is an understatement. Owen takes the fairytale of The Goose Girl and upends it while still keeping the recognizable bits of the tale. It’s creative and the way she uses the bits from the fairytale make sense, in a way that leaves you thinking, “How did she come up with that?” I read the book almost entirely in one sitting. That’s how much I enjoyed it.

Perhaps what I enjoyed most was how clearly Owen has taken her ability to create comics and translated it into prose. Little Thieves is bursting with detail that I could visualize very easily simply because Owen knew how to describe what she was seeing artistically in her head into words. I sometimes have trouble picturing what an author is trying to describe; I didn’t have an issue here.

All of the things I loved about Margaret Owen’s comic on deviantART years ago are present in Little Thieves as well: Wonderfully layered characters, hilarious banter, an interesting world, and a romantic arc that made me squee. Yes, squee. Vanja herself is one of the best YA characters I’ve read in a long while. She does horrible things, yes, but given the world she grew up in, it makes sense. Owen treats her both with sympathy but also making certain she does, indeed, pay her debts. If the book had simply been entirely of banter between her and Emeric, I would have been over the moon. Owen simply has a way with words that can make you laugh like a donkey — then pages later, she’ll have you tearing up.

Some readers may find the villain to be lacking in nuance, but frankly, the world is full of men like the villain, and I find him all too believably real. The ending may also lack a bit of a punch to some readers; again, I didn’t mind it.

I honestly have very little else to say except that I adored Little Thieves, and I’m so looking forward to everything else Owen releases in the future.

Book Review: The Misadventures of an Amateur Naturalist (Celeste Rossan #1) by Ceinwen Langley

⭐⭐

Rating: 2 out of 5.

Genre: Historical Fantasy Fairytale Retelling
Publisher: Feed the Writer Press
Publication Date: September 1st, 2021
Pages: 365, eBook
Source: Library

Aspiring young naturalist Celeste Rossan is determined to live a life of adventure and scientific discovery. But when her father loses everything, Celeste’s hopes of ever leaving her home town are dashed… until she sees a narrow opportunity to escape to Paris and attend the 1867 Exposition Universelle.

Celeste seizes her chance, but the elements overwhelm her before she can make it five miles. In desperation, she seeks refuge in an abandoned chateau only to find herself trapped inside the den of an unknown species: a predator with an intelligence that rivals any human.

It’s the discovery of a lifetime. Or, it will be, if Celeste can earn the beast’s trust without losing her nerve – or her heart – to her in the process.

The Misadventures of an Amateur Naturalist has some interesting spins on the Beauty and the Beast fairytale, such as Celeste (the Beauty) sacrificing herself to a marriage she doesn’t want in order to save her family, instead of sacrificing herself to the Beast, as well as making her a naturalist/scientist. I did enjoy these takes on the plot beats of the original fairytale. I also liked Celeste well enough as a main character, although I’m not sure she had much of an arc, as such. I felt she was more or less the same character in the end as she was in the beginning of the novel.

The biggest issue is that the pacing is very off. We don’t meet the Beast until close to the 50% mark. The first half is spent on Celeste’s life and the circumstances that lead her to being desperate enough to run away. I’m not opposed to this idea, but we simply spend too much time in it, and as a consequence the story dragged quite a lot. The better choice may have been to shorten this and have Celeste act sooner.

Langley’s choice not to introduce the Beast until nearly halfway in also harmed the progression of Celeste’s relationship with her. Their progression from distrust to trust, to friendship, to love wasn’t as clear cut as I would have liked, and in the end I’m not entirely certain I believed the love between them. Quite literally, Celeste initially spends more time on-page with a barn owl in the castle than she does with the Beast.

At times it felt like Langley suffered from the issue of not really knowing what to have Celeste do in the castle, and instead chose to focus more on scenes with Celeste and the Beast. However then the issue became that there simply wasn’t enough time to develop that relationship as it should have been developed.

Also, if I didn’t know this was the first in a possible series, I would have been very put off by the fact that Celeste doesn’t seem to spend much time thinking about her family in the last chapter. They still believe she’s dead and here she is, going off on an adventure with her wife, and she doesn’t even think about them once. No remorse? No guilt? Maybe this will be handled in the sequel, but it should have had a mention here, in my opinion.

The strongest parts of the novel were the technical writing aspects of it — Langley has a lovely writing style that’s easy to read, and I was able to envision her world easily. Her characters were also strong, and I appreciated that she didn’t go the Gaston route with Celeste’s fiance Etienne. If the issues of pacing were fixed, I would have enjoyed this novel much more. I may still read the sequel (I’m thinking it’ll be a Little Mermaid retelling, given some dialogue in the end).