I am so excited to get to be apart of this tour by TBR and Beyond Tours. This book has such an interesting premise and I absolutely adore the cover. It's just gorgeous!
Check out information and links relating to the book and author below. Also, I have my review down here too.
About
The Book:
Author: Margaret Owen
Pub. Date: October 19, 2021
Genres: Young Adult, Fantasy
Pages: ~512
Purchase Links:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Book Depository
Indigo
Indiebound
Once upon a time, there was a horrible girl...
VanjaSchmidt 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 herplace. 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.
My Rating: 4/5 stars
My Review:
I was very grateful to receive an eARC copy of this book in exchange for taking part in a book tour. I was very excited. This is my honest opinion of the book.
I will admit that I didn’t know that this was a fairytale retelling. I’m not someone who knows all fairytales so it was interesting to learn that it was a retelling of The Goose Girl. I don’t know enough to know whether it accurately related to the fairy tale, but other reviews seem to think it loosely fits.
Vanja makes for a very interesting main character. This is the second book I’ve read recently that had…unconventional protagonists. It’s not that Vanja is a horrendous person, but I’d definitely put her under the morally ambiguous category. She’s a thief, hence the title, but she also does have some reasoning behind her login (even if the reasoning is skewed). I really enjoyed her as a character. She’s quick witted and sarcastic which are two things that I find appealing in a character. I also really enjoyed that throughout the story she began to soften a bit, but never quite loses her edge.
There were a couple of side characters including Emeric, Gisele, Ragne, and Adalbrecht. I will admit that this was kind of an issue with me, but it’s definitely a personal thing and nothing to do with the book. I just have a hard time keeping characters separate in my head and that led to some annoyance for me. I did really enjoy Ragne. I thought she was just a great character, and she stole my heart.
Okay, now the story was really interesting. Vanja is a thief trying to raise money to escape her godmothers. She makes a mistake while attempting a larger heist and finds herself cursed. I loved the idea of it, but I did have a slight issue getting into the swing of the book. I think that’s because, as a fantasy book, things (and the world) have to be explained. Once Vanja was cursed I found that it picked up the pace a bit more and I found myself more interested in the story. Mind you, this was also when Ragne was introduced so I’m not really sure which one led to my interest. The ending did feel a bit light or out of place, but it wasn’t a bad way to end the book necessarily.
I just want to quickly mention my other two issues with this book. I thought at some points that it got overly descriptive, and it just always felt like it slowed the story down a bit. Considering I had a hard time originally getting into this story, the descriptions became a bit much after a while. My other issue is the words that weren’t in English. That sounds bad to say, but it mainly came down to the fact that I found myself having to search out what words meant or else I had a hard time figuring out what was being talked about.
Altogether, this was a pretty good book. A bit more than I would have liked at some point, but I quite enjoyed the characters and the plotline. It was fun and felt controlled. At no point did it feel like things were just happening to happen or that the author had forgotten the plot of the book.
About Margaret Owen:
Born and raised at the end of the Oregon Trail, Margaret Owen first encountered an author in the
wild in fourth grade. Roughly twenty seconds later, she decided she too would be an author, the first of many well-thought-out life decisions.
The career plan shifted frequently as Margaret spent her childhood haunting the halls of Powell’s
Books. After earning her degree in Japanese, her love of espresso called her north to Seattle, where she worked in everything from thrift stores to presidential campaigns. The common thread between every job can be summed up as: lessons were learned.
Fortunately, it turned out that fourth-grade Margaret was onto something. She now spends her days
wrestling disgruntled characters onto the page, and negotiating a long-term hostage situation with
her two monstrous cats. (There is surprisingly little difference between the two.) In her free time, she enjoys exploring ill-advised travel destinations, and raising money for social justice nonprofits through her illustrations.
Website |
Twitter |
Goodreads |
Instagram |
Tumblr
No comments:
Post a Comment