Little Thieves by Margaret Owen

Amy  

young adult, fantasy

In this fairy tale retelling of The Goose Girl, Vanja was given away by her mother to the gods Fortune and Death when she was a young child. Her adopted godmothers sent her to serve as a princess’ maid until she would be old enough to choose whether to become the servant of Fortune or Death. But while a maid, Vanja was met with cruelty. Deciding she didn’t want to become a servant to either of her godmothers and wanting to get even with the wealthy class for ruining her childhood, she hatched a plan to purchase her way to freedom. However, after accidentally crossing a lower god, she is cursed and only has two weeks to set things right before the curse kills her.

Even though this was a fairy tale retelling, it felt very much like an actual fairy tale with magical creatures, customs, curses, kings, and princesses, etc.  I had not been familiar with The Goose Girl. However, I found it in my copy of Grimms’ Fairy Tales and read it when I was near the end of this novel.

Little Thieves by Margaret Owen was not so much a retelling as an expansion of the original version of the tale. Personally, I prefer retellings where the author creates something of their own, disguising the original story in a different setting/time/place than the original.

The first quarter of Little Thieves was, frankly, lackluster. I was just about to abandon the book when it finally caught my interest. The last half was fun. The romance was predictable from the beginning (mostly due to their similar young ages) but the characters held my attention. The morals of the story are that people should love, be kind to themselves and each other, and not be selfish.

Saskia Maarleveld was the audiobook narrator. I've enjoyed her narration in the past. She always does a great job with eastern European-sounding words and names. She also has a nice catalog of different voices and accents. However, in this production, there were more than a handful of obvious overdubs where she went back and re-recorded a few sentences. They sounded completely different from the main narrative. I'll give her an A-.