Hello, reader!

Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for Little Thieves by Margaret Owen hosted by TBR & Beyond Tours! This is one of my most anticipated releases of 2021 and, spoiler alert, it did not disappoint! A loose retelling of The Goose Girl, this is a young adult fantasy that blends the magic of a dark fairytale with the excitement of a heist novel. It’s atmospheric, it’s engaging, and it left me feeling like I immediately wanted to re-read it!

Before we get more into this post, though, we must do our thank-yous! Thank you so much to the team at TBR & Beyond Tours for giving me a spot on this one. Thank you to the publisher, Henry Holt & Company, and Netgalley for providing me a free e-ARC in exchange for my participation and an honest review. It is always appreciated and even more so when I ended up loving the book as much as I did! Also, seeming as this is a tour, there are of course quite a few incredible blogger/bookstgrammers that are involved. If you would like to see the schedule so see their awesome content, just click HERE.

Alright, now let’s kick off this tour post!

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• Vanja is both a gremlin and an absolute treasure! Do you like your main characters to be smart, cunning, and with a flair for the sarcastic? You’re gonna love Vanja. She makes terrible choices and you find yourself caring about her so much that you just go along for the ride.
• This nails dark, wintery vibes. This is the perfect book to get you in the mood for the later part of the year. The atmosphere is top-notch! NO THOUGHTS, JUST VIBES! (But actually quite a lot of thoughts… we’ll get to that later)
• A dark fairytale at it’s finest. If you like dark fairytales, this is kind of a must-read. It hits that perfect feel of being told a bedtime story but one with a lot more blood and danger. If you’ve ever read German children’s fairytales from back in the day… you know what I mean.
• The LGBTQIA+ representation! This book is filled with it, in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. I do love a story that casually weaves in LGBT characters because the fact that a woman has a wife should just be normal. Not some big to-do. But I also appreciate the more in-depth look at different communities that fall under the LGBTQIA+ banner.
• The mental health representation! I did not expect this book to make me sob BUT HERE WE ARE. More on that later, but this book does an incredible job of showing how past trauma can affect someone.

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“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.

Margaret Owen, author of The Merciful Crow series, crafts a delightfully irreverent retelling of “The Goose Girl” about stolen lives, thorny truths, and the wicked girls at the heart of both.“

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