Little Thieves is a Young Adult Fantasy book series by Margaret Owen. The first book, Little Thieves was published in 2021. Book two, Painted Devils came out in 2023. Tropes pertaining to it can be found here.
The series follows Vanja Schmidt, a young girl who was abandoned by her mother, who believed her to be bad luck because she's the thirteenth child of a thirteenth child. She was adopted and raised by two goddesses, Fortune and Death, who then arranged for her to be the servant to a princess named Gisele and her family. Scared, alone, and broken by their mistreatment, the goddesses offer to take her back and protect her for the rest of her days but only if she chooses one of them and offer the chosen goddess a terrible price. Instead, Vanja stole the princess's enchanted pearls, thus stealing her appearance and identity. While masquerading as her, she gathered money by secretly stealing from nobles, becoming known as the Penny Phantom.
When Vanja is close to completing her final caper and getting enough money to escape the kingdom, she runs afoul of a forest goddess who curses her so that her body will slowly transform into a statue made of jewels unless she pays back what she has stolen while in the goddess's lands. Doing so will not be easy, as Gisele has been betrothed to a powerful and dangerous warlord, and investigators are hot on the Phantom's heels.
This work contains examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Death and Fortune weren't very good godmothers, turning Vanja out into the world after only a brief time raising her, and doing nothing when her caretakers horribly abused her. She assumes working for them would be like working for nobles but on a godly scale and refuses to serve either of them.
- Gisele's mother constantly pushes her to diet and makes comments about her weight.
- Alpha Bitch: Erhmgard, a vicious bully who takes advantage of her status to frame Vanja for stealing. Book two also reveals that she went as far as pulling the scabs off of Vanja's back, calling her ugly, and tainting the freshly opened wounds with a substance that would make them even harder to heal and scar worse because she was treating them with a salve. Gisele was this to a lesser extent, but she wasn't nearly as cruel and only joined in on less serious acts of bullying when pressured to.
- An Offer You Can't Refuse: Adelbrecht essentially threatens Gisele's parents for her hand in marriage.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Vanja takes Gisele's place after Gisele asked her to take her place only in the hard parts of being the Margrave's wife.
- Body to Jewel: The curse placed on Vanja. This is also Margrave Adelbrecht's punishment when his crimes are proven to the gods.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: The gods run on this. It's part of the reason why Death and Fortune are so insistent on Vanja choosing one of them and paying the price, and have so much trouble accepting why that hurts Vanja so much. Meanwhile, the forest goddess curses Vanja for stealing a sacred ring, but does absolutely nothing about the abuses and cruelties the ring's owners carried out. And then it turns out that the curse on Vanja was a ploy to get her to stop Adelbrecht.
- By-the-Book Cop: Prefect Conrad is a very adept investigator and not fond of breaking the rules.
- Child Prodigy: Conrad is the youngest person to ever become a Prefect.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Vanja tries to throw off the Junior Prefect Conrad when he's questioning her by wearing only a robe and a nightgown and eating sausages with him.
- Entitled to Have You: Adelbrecht feels this way about Gisele even though he knows he's marrying an impostor and that he's going to kill her once they're legally wed. Despite all of this he detests the idea of his bride flirting with another man.
- Establishing Character Moment: Adelbrecht, upon meeting Vanja who is still masquerading as Gisele, makes his distaste at the idea of her dressing somewhat provocatively in front of another man well known, gives her ridiculous golden statues that are meant to glorify him as a wedding gift, and makes it clear that he thinks if someone's poor it's their own fault and they are undeserving of charity.
- Fairytale Motifs: The book is a loose - yet accurate in specific ways - retelling of The Goose Girl
- Fantastic Drug: Witch Ash, which is addictive and can drive someone insane from overuse but can give people useful magic if used in managed doses.
- Fiery Redhead: Vanja's real appearance.
- Glamour: Gisele's pearls are the source of her beauty, and adjust to show the viewer what they want to see. She looks completely unrecognizable without them.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Ragna, the daughter of the goddess who curses Vanja, is a demigoddess. She explains that her mother fell in love with a human man and the end result was her.
- Hypocrite: Gisele is furious that Vanja would abandon her to suffer, despite that being exactly what she did to Vanja when she was framed for stealing by a cruel noble girl her family was desperate to please. She even expected Vanja to take her place when the Margrave wanted to bed her. Also, she initially refuses to take her identity back despite knowing that this is a condition for undoing Vanja's curse because she's found out that the Margrave is planning on killing her.
- Just Like Robin Hood: Vanja views herself this way, detesting the exceedingly wealthy nobility who abuse and neglect the poor without any consequences. She views her stealing from them as a form of retribution. She doesn't give to the poor until the curse forces her to, however.
- Laser-Guided Karma: As the story goes on, it becomes clear that part of the reason Vanja stole Gisele's identity is because she was badly abused and neglected by Gisele's peers when working for her, and Gisele refused to help her despite viewing her as a friend. In some cases she joined in.
- Adelbrecht is turned into a gold statue by the gods.
- Erhmghard, the girl responsible for framing Vanja and getting her whipped bloody, is revealed to working with the Margrave to commit treason and loses everything. It's implied that she'll be spending the rest of her days rotting in the dungeon of the castle she thought she'd be the lady of. Vanja also goes to her and taunts her about it and how rich she's become for good measure.
- Mayfly–December Romance: This is not frowned upon in the nobility.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Conrad has this reaction after he finds out that his furious accusations of Vanja having killed his mentor were completely wrong.
- Gisele eventually accepts that she should have done more to protect Vanja.
- Never My Fault: Even after having Vanja's reasons for stealing her identity, it takes some time for Gisele to stop acting like she deserved some karma for betraying Vanja.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: Junior Prefect Conrad deliberately puts on the air of someone timid, inexperienced, and naiive so that people will underestimate him and to hide the fact that he's actually investigating the Margrave.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: The maids of the castle work in pairs so that none of them ever run into the Margrave by themselves.
- Rags to Riches: The first book begins after Vanja has successfully stolen Princess Gisele's identity. Even after returning her identity and giving away a fortune in charity, Vanja is still quite well off at the end of the book. Shedding the armloads of jewels that had been growing on her body gave her more than enough money to accomplish her goals.
- Riches to Rags: Princess Gisele's plight at the start of the first book.
- Erhmgard winds up imprisoned for life, losing her title and fortune.
- Unequal Pairing: Gisele's betrothed, Margrave Adelbrecht, is twice her age. While age gap romances are not frowned upon in the nobility, Vanja realizes that this is always the case for a man who seeks a bride so much younger than him. He also strongarmed Gisele's parents into agreeing to the marriage.
- Seers: Vanja has the power to see bad luck and good luck because she's touched by Fortune.
- Conrad can also tell when someone is godtouched or cursed, but only with his glasses.
- Spoiled Brat: Gisele has a hard time accepting that barely keeping Vanja clothed, fed, and housed does not excuse the abuses she endured under them, and can't accept that she is anything less than a wholly innocent victim. Later chapters make it clear that she expects Vanja to stick her neck out for her, but doesn't expect to protect her from her abusers.
