Little Thieves by Margaret Owen is a retelling of the fairy tale "The Goose girl", where the maidservant of a princess steals her mistress' identity when she's on the way to her wedding.
The protagonist is Vanja Schmidt, who was abandoned by her mother who consider her "unlucky" for being the 13th daughter of a 13th daughter, and taken in as a goddaughter by the goddesses Death and Fortune. On her 7th year she is left in the human world because the realm of her godmothers can't sustain a mortal child any longer, and is told that the price for their care is to choose between one of them as their godmother, something she would rather not.
Vanja becomes a servant in the von falbirg castle, serving as a maidservant to princess Gisele. On the travel to the castle of Gisele's future husband Adalbert, Vanja steals Gisele's identity by taking her magical necklace which allows her to assume her appearance. While the real Gisele is left a penniless nobody, Vanja uses the necklace to steal from nobility by switching between the appearance of Gisele and her maid.
Overall, the book was an enjoyable read, but there's a casual mention of queer acceptance which I don't find convincing and contradicts earlier established worldbuilding, and also hurts the message its trying to portray: to sum it up, the problem with the worldbuilding is that it presents class as the only systemic oppression, even though it clashes with other wb details.
After Vanja realizes that Gisele likes girls, she states in her monologue that this means her parents will have to look for noble girls "whose parents initially thought they were boys". So in other worlds, in this society trans people are accepted.
Except this line clashes with earlier pre-established information; It was stated that "may-december romances" arent uncommon among the nobility, like Gisele many young girls among the nobility are married off to much older partners because marriage for the upper classes were transactional affairs, plus Gisele's parents married her off to a man they knew was a POS.
So there's no way they would prioritize Gisele's feelings when there's wealth and alliances to be gained, especially since their family has been impoverished for a while.
I think this is one of the cases where an author makes a world where there's no gender roles and same-sex marriages are normalized, but doesnt put in the work to justify it, and doesnt think how it interacts with hereditary monarchies and class systems.
Historically, sexual divisions of labor and attitudes towards sex were based on the reality of who could give get pregnant and give birth, which would also be true for a low-tech setting with similar limitations. The world of Little Thieves is different from our own, and I can believe that gender roles and sexual attitudes are different if only it was communicated in the books the reason why.
The fact that Gisele's marital partner has to be AMAB tells us that there are no magic spells that allow for same-sex individuals to have children together, and since inheritance is based on bloodline which doesnt allow for adopting random kids off the street, I highly doubt Gisele's parents would take the trouble of looking for spouses among noble trans girls instead of prioritizing their family's economic interests.
The book makes a point that girls like Gisele are victims of an unjust system and had to become hardened and cruel to survive, unlike the men in power who prey on them; Gisele's arranged husband Adalbert von Reigenbach is the main antagonist of the story, and on his visit to von Falbirg he sexually assaulted Vanja, and the reason the von Falbirgs sent Vanja to accompany Gisele to Adalbert's estate was to be his sexual outlet.
So to sum it up, it feels like the author wanted her world to be progressive in terms of everything except class, but doesnt connect the dots of how a class system where status is hereditary would affect how marriage would work and expectations for women, and harms the story as a critique of patriarchal systems.
This might not be completely coherent, but I hope I've made my point.
by valonianfool
2 Comments
I haven’t read it, but your review makes it sound like Bridgerton. Bridgerton has many non-white characters, including a black queen, and removes the racial history of the period. But keeps the sex discrimination history of the period, mostly because the social expectations are romanticised or eroticised in the books. And the argument is that it’s just supposed to be fun, and it’s fun for present day non-white people to see themselves in a fancy regency setting, and I get that. It’s just then it also tries to make points about racism or present certain characters as disadvantaged in a setting where racism apparently doesn’t exist.
All of these progressive takes on fairytales / a romanticised history period / power fantasies like superheroes have a place, I just feel like in the past the authors would have accepted they were writing cozy fluff and not try and do two incompatible things at once.
>So to sum it up, it feels like the author wanted her world to be progressive in terms of everything except class, but doesnt connect the dots of how a class system where status is hereditary would affect how marriage would work and expectations for women, and harms the story as a critique of patriarchal systems.
That was completely coherent, and an issue I have with quite a few books that aren’t sure where to place the cursor. Many authors use one particular aspect of society and make it ultra progressive to give some originality beyond “everything is backwards and sucks,” but then other aspects of the world seem like they should be in complete contradiction with the progressive part yet it’s never mentioned.