Charlotte Kersten

So What’s It About?

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.

What I Thought

I think my favorite thing about this book is Vanja herself. I really enjoyed her as a character who is brilliant and plucky and hilarious; she truly lives up to the author’s dedication to “gremlin girls who throw bricks through windows when doors close on them.” More seriously, I think her characterization around her lack of trust in others is really well done. She is used to being on her own, forced to look out for herself, and sure that others always want to exploit her. Her love interest Emeric is able to provide her with some much-needed compassion in this regard, telling her that some lives make it easier to be a good person and she has not had one of those lives – but nevertheless, she is brave and better than she gives herself credit for, and that her dislike for herself makes sense given how she has been abandoned and betrayed.

There are some interesting elements woven into all of this, such as her self-blame regarding how her employers treated her (despite most of her knowing better), her self-sabotage, and her uncertainty and awkwardness when others are kind to her. Once she starts to realize how good it is to not be alone, this spooks her, so to speak, causing her to lash out and then eventually start to grieve for what she didn’t have. I loved all of this and found Vanja to be one of the best YA protagonists I’ve read since Tess from Tess of the Road.

Unfortunately, I was not super invested in her romance with Emeric. That being said, I do think they make sense together as two smart outcasts who love to untangle puzzles and chase/be chased respectively. And I really like that he isn’t the typical smirking, snarking, smoldering chiseled asshole type that is so popular in YA romances these days.

The romance between Gisele and Ragne also didn’t really work for me. I just didn’t see enough of it to get invested, and it moves incredibly quickly. As individual characters, though, Gisele and Ragne are great. I really loved Gisele’s own arc of unlearning her privilege and finally standing up to her parents for Vanja. The relationship between her and Vanja is complex and interesting, where shallow princess/servant relationships can can sometimes be a flaw of Goose Girl retellings. Both did harmful things to the other and were harmed in turn, especially as Gisele was simultaneously complicit in Vanja’s abuse but shielded from it, but they are able to find their way to reconciliation and renewed friendship as the story unfolds.

All of the cons and heists and gradual sorting through of the mystery are really fun and satisfying. There is a lot of plotting, sneaking, bluffing, and disguising in clever escapades, which I think could make this a great read for those who loved that aspect of Six of Crows.

The exploration of classism and privilege is fairly cursory, with the exception of the bits with Gisele for me, but I think it is perfectly solid for a teenage audience without being too heavy-handed or preachy. Similarly, Adelbracht is not a particularly deep villain but he works well for the story and is certainly properly villainous.

I enjoyed this enough to decide I will get myself a paper copy – and I also want one because the illustrations of the little stories at the start of each section are beautiful! It’s definitely one of the best YA books I’ve read for a while. I had so much fun and am looking forward to reading the next book soon.