Little Thieves

Little Thieves is a fantasy novel by the American writer Margaret Owen, published in 2021 and the first book of a series.

Vanja's double life is a business arrangement as much as a deception: she charms the nobility by day and empties their strongboxes by night, and the money is going into a fund for her escape from a future she was told she owed. The loneliness of the arrangement is what the novel keeps returning to, since a woman who has stolen somebody else's name cannot be known by anybody, and the two mothers who set the price for her upbringing are not the sort of parents who can be appealed to. One heist away from leaving the country, she crosses a god who does not take theft lightly, and the curse that follows turns the last stage of her plan into a countdown. Owen writes the fairy-tale machinery as a working economy of bargains, debts and papers, and the story it retells is one in which a servant is given a chance to be somebody else.