Little Thieves
Margaret Owen
The dedication sets the tone for the book
To the gremlin girls,
I would like to tell you something inspiring,
but the truth is,
when life closes a door for us,
it doesn’t always open a window.
The good news is:
That’s what bricks are for.
Little Thieves is the story of an imposter, a wicked maid, Vanja, who switches places with a princess and pretends to be her. Given the title of the novel, it should come as no surprise to you that Vanja is also a thief. The title comes from this saying, "Little thieves steal gold, and great ones steal kingdoms, but only one goes to the gallows." Vanja is a splendid character. She is clever, but she is not so clever as she thinks she is. She is selfish, but not so selfish as she thinks she is. She finds herself in trouble almost immediately and spends most of the novel trying to maneuver her way out of it.
There is also a romance story that, unusually, I liked quite a lot. I generally feel that young adult books would be better without the virtually obligatory formulaic romance subplot. It is not quite true that, "If you've read one romance, you've read them all." But if you've read (the right) five romances, you've read almost all the rest, too. The romance in Little Thieves was refreshingly original -- although some of the common tropes are detectable, it was, as a whole, like nothing I had read before. And it was a GOOD story, too!
Little Thieves is ostensibly a retelling of The Goose Girl. I forgot that until it was mentioned in the acknowledgements, so I looked the story up last night after finishing Little Thieves. I would advise you, too, to forget about The Goose Girl when you read Little Thieves. Little Thieves is for the most part a completely original new novel whose characters and plot are unrelated to those of the original Grimm Brothers Fairy Tale. A few characters and incidents can be identified with things that happen in The Goose Girl, but only a few, and they are mostly unimportant.
Little Thieves is, overall, a delightfully transgressive novel. Under the right circumstances, crime DOES pay! That's what bricks are for!
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