I really enjoyed Little Thieves by Margaret Owen. I enjoyed it so much that I didn’t even notice it was first person, present tense until I was practically done reading it, which is a testament to when that very thing works for YA. First-person is the most popular POV these days for YA and present tense seems to be on the rise, but I don’t think it should be used as much as it is. In Little Thieves, technically the fairy tales (seven in all, each a few pages long) are in past tense, but the rest of it is a draw-close and tell-all from the POV of a spunky, feisty, perhaps misbehaving sixteen-year-old girl, so it pretty much works here. It’s no literary giant (and it’s not even a Six of Crows), but it’s great fun. Funny. Kinda light considering the subject matter and the evil therein. The pieces come together in the end, and the ending is better than just satisfying: it’s surprising and satisfying.

Note: Owen includes a content warning at the beginning of the book, which includes abuse and sexual abuse. Neither are quite explicit.

Vanja was taken to the woods when she was a toddler, to get rid of her: a thirteenth child of a thirteenth child. The Low Gods, Death and Fortune, fostered her and raise her. But when it becomes a matter of a lifetime of servitude and the reality of rejection, Vanja ends up on a journey from the castle where she is a maidservant, to a girl betrothed to a neighboring prince… and somehow becomes both a fake princess and a jewel thief on top of it all, in a wild grab to earn her freedom. But taking what is not yours is going to bring ill luck to your door, either as the curse of a forest goddess, the schemes of power-hungry royalty, the eye of the fairy-tale law, or the hurt feelings of your abandoned friends… or all four. Vanja must figure out how to break the curse and get out of town before everything (and Death) catches up with her.

This is the first book that I read for a YA-for-adults book club I was trying out. I mean, I already read a lot of YA (partly because I write YA), so I thought it would be fun to find some other grown-ups who do the same (besides my friend two states away). I don’t think this book had crossed my radar, before, which seems strange to me now that I have read it. The thing is, there are just so many books out there. This is YA/fairy-tale/fantasy. It has a great heroine and a good romance (though that is in the background to the adventure and the soul-searching/coming-of-age).

Little Thieves is the first in a trilogy which consists of Little Thieves, Painted Devils, and the 2025-anticipated Holy Terrors. It is a retelling of “The Goose Girl,” a Brothers Grimm fairy tale (and also a book in the Books of Bayern tetralogy by Shannon Hale). It could be read alone, but I liked the world, story, and characters enough that I plan to read the rest of the trilogy—the second one soon and the third one, well, at least next year.

I will admit that during the first couple chapters, I wondered if I would like this book. The writing proficiency is fine, but left me underwhelmed. And it takes time to get to know the other things, so I wasn’t sure where I would fall. But in the end, the writing style is at least endearing, even if it doesn’t have literary acrobatics (or even cleanness or complete clearness) going for it. The voice of the main character is strong and we get a ton of sass and spice, even as the narrator addresses us directly in snarky asides and wanders into emotional epiphanies. There are some LGBTQ+ characters (who, for the record, felt shoe-horned in). Overall, though, the writing borders on chaste, so don’t expect any steamy scenes, though the romance(s) do have energy and some sizzle. There’s more innuendo than explicitness.

There are occasional plot holes and inconsistencies, though probably not any huge ones; more like intra-scene issues. You can relax and get past that. But you will also have to accept that this story is in no way consistent with medieval times or German fairy tales. What I mean is that some of the culture is there (like food and clothes and weather and whatever), but the ideas are almost completely modern. I am aware that this is the way some authors have chosen to deal with writing “historical” when many of their ideals don’t jive with the times and they want to be PC or whatever. I don’t think this is a fault, necessarily (unless it is a fault of many writers), but don’t expect historical accuracy, especially when it comes to ideas. A character might be stuck in an arranged marriage, but they’re not going to think or behave like someone who is from a time period where arranged marriages were the norm, for example. Vanja is a modern, girl-power heroine, after all. Which also means she’s not all good. You know, the whole thief thing. Etc.

I don’t have much more to say about this book except that I ended up really enjoying it and looking forward to the next book in the series, wondering what happens with miss sassy-pants and her love interest and maybe even some of the other characters. Definitely some funny scenes. Tension around every corner. Plot twists all over the place. Adequate writing. A complete world consisting of Germany, fairy tales, the medieval world, and folk magic.

Margaret Owen is a newer writer with a fun bio HERE, at her website. She has been pumping out a book a year in her (first?) two YA series, Little Thieves and The Merciful Crow (a duology of The Merciful Crow and The Faithless Hawk). The Merciful Crow series is called “gritty YA.” While the ratings on the first book aren’t amazing, it was fairly popular, and the ratings on the second book are more consistent with the Little Thieves books… like a 4.3. As I said earlier, Little Thieves will be a trilogy. Owen does her own, impressive artwork, and has some other, universe-related shorts and things around and about.

“The answer to a question like this is always, always no, by the way. It’s a trick. You might tell them something they already knew; you might confess to a greater trespass than they imagined. If they’re going to catch you, make them work for it” (p160).

“Some part of me has always looked for how I brought these things on myself …. and if I could figure out where I went wrong, they wouldn’t call me stupid or throw things or strike me. / There had to be a reason for it. That made it something I could control. Something I could hope to stop. / It’s the worst kind of relief for someone to say it was never in my control” (p344).

“…I’m learning the bitter difference between independence and self-exile” (p346).

“For all my schemes and facades and artifice, I am not prepared in the slightest for the simple, devastating intimacy of being believed” (p355).

“Klemens had a theory that most crimes derive from five motives: greed, love, hate, revenge, or fear” (p391).

THE GOOSE GIRL

I grabbed my copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales off of the shelf to read “The Goose Girl.” In case you didn’t know, the Brothers Grimm—Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm—were story collectors, not story-makers like the usual, modern writer. They travelled around collecting oral stories and then used different means to translate them to the page. “The Goose Girl” is one of these stories, collected from an old, oral tradition in what would become Germany.

“The Goose Girl” is a pretty standard fairy tale. It is a little dark, but not excessively violent (well, maybe it is, actually), and includes some sort of moral amidst its frank randomness. In it, a princess is betrothed to a prince in another kingdom, and travels there to be married, with her chambermaid. Also, they take the princess’s talking horse. On the journey, the maid tricks or traps the princess into becoming the maid while the maid poses as the princess. Then the new princess abandons the real princess and goes off to live the other’s life. There are a lot of moments where the real princess calls on help or at least advice from inanimate objects and they answer in bad poetry. There is a talking skull. A slasher-movie level punishment. And there is a poor goose boy who reveals that the princess hasn’t really learned anything even though she’ll get what she “deserves”—a kingdom—in the end. As usual, there are some strange senses of rightness that translate as foreign to us: like keeping an oath to someone who has wrongfully acquired it. And characters who accept their fate and wait for the great balancing scales of karma and magic to fix it.

I can see why an author would read this story and wonder about it, want to tell it as an actually nuanced story with realistic characters. While Owen disposes of some large plot points from “The Goose Girl”—like the goose boy and his hat that keeps being sung over the mountain while the princess washes her hair (while she’s supposed to be working, I might add)—she transposes other things—like the horse’s skull and the importance of Falada to the climax—in really great ways. It makes perfect sense that Owen would shift perspectives to the maid, too. Not only is this right up our current culture’s alley, but “The Goose Girl”’s princess doesn’t exactly inspire a whole lotta sympathy (though Shannon Hale would make an attempt at earning her some in the Books of Bayern’s series, The Goose Girl). Still, taking something as small as a fairy tale and expanding it as well as reimagining it the way that Owen did: it’s pretty special.

I can’t say I love “The Goose Girl” as a story. It’s weird and gory and you can’t quite like the heroine, who is much more a victim than a heroine (which is, again, why Owen was likely drawn to it). I do like Grimms Fairy Tales as a whole, though, and my kids—when they were kids—liked it even more than me. For that review, follow the link.

Just a few days ago, it was announced that Little Thieves would be made into an animated movie (by someone previously from Disney and Netflix). I don’t know how much to believe this news, as I can’t find it at any mainstream publications, but it’s also not the kind of thing that would get much press… yet. I guess I am hoping that this is true. Animated could be a great way to go with so much magic (not to mention characters in the skin of other characters), but it does make me wonder about what age audience they will be shooting for. And quite frankly, you can’t know how great a movie will be, or even if it will be finished, until it’s made.

The book trailer can be found HERE.