The Thief Lord: Book Review

Well, you were right, Laura. The Thief Lord is a pretty damn good book. I'm sorry it took me so many years to read it.
Speaking of book punishments, I told you to read Paper Towns months ago. You failed to do so. Therefore, my response is this; you have to read Paper Towns by the end of August, or I'll simply not do one of your punishments. Say... the vegetarianism punishment. And you wouldn't want that, would you? >:)
Anyways. Onto the book.

The Thief Lord hits most of the "good book" stereotypes. The story was reasonably intriguing, the writing was of good quality and, most predominantly in this book, the  characters were likeable. All of these things combined kept me up reading until 2:00AM the night I flew into New Brunswick from Edmonton.
I'll tackle all of the above points in order, although perhaps leaving out the "good quality writing" segment. I can't explain that. Only actually reading the book will do that, and I'll let you do that on your own. The plot, though, I can do.
The Thief Lord follows two young brothers, Prosper and Bo, and their struggles to keep together. Having run away from their aunt, they managed to hike their way into Venice, Italy, where they hope their worries will disappear.
Soon, they're picked up by a gang of other young kids. Living in an abandoned theatre and supplied for by the mysterious Thief Lord, everything seems good and well. Their aunt, though, is out to spoil there fun. Having tracked the boys to Venice, she hires a private detective to find the boys. Throw in a shady thieving job and a magical merry-go-round, and things might not be as jolly for the gang as they'd thought...
There. Gotta end it with the dot dot dot.
The best thing about The Thief Lord, hands down, is the characters presented. We have, in order of my liking for them;

• Victor Getz, the detective. He's just the nicest guy! It doesn't take long for the reader to figure out that he's not the bad guy in this story. From his efforts to aid the kids to his love for his tortoises, you fall in love with Victor very early on.
• Prosper, the older of the two brothers. Prosper is probably the most sensible and cool headed kid in the bunch, with the exception of maybe Hornet. You have to love him for how protective he is of his brother Bo.
• Hornet, the one female in the group of kids. She's basically a female version of Prosper. Sensible and cool-headed like him, she's also one of the more caring members of the group.
• Scipio, or The Thief Lord. The leader of the kids, with a secret.
• Bo, the annoying little brother of Prosper. The polar opposite of his brother, Bo is stupid and annoying. Sorry. I suppose that he is six years old in this story.
• Riccio and Mosca, the other two kids in the gang. I list these guys last 'cause nobody really cares about them. I don't even know who's who. One of them's black. The other has spiky hair. One of them likes to fish. That's all I can tell you.

There are maybe three other important people in this story, but I don't remember their names and/or I don't really care about them. So there.

Combining the above two elements made for a great story, but I felt that the ending dampened my liking for the book some. Leave know if you haven't read the book.

Okay. They're gone.

Now, about that crummy ending. I suppose the place to start my complaints would be the magical merry-go-round.

Here's my problem; we go through the entire book and there's not a single fantasy element. Then, right at the end, this one slaps us in the face.

I like fantasy well enough. The thing is, I want to know that there are fantastical elements to the story early on. In this book, we're sort of given a glimpse of it halfway through the book. Already halfway done. Then, that isn't really developed until the last quarter of the book. By then it seemed out of place, you know?

Then, the kid's antics with the merry-go-round threw me off. Why would Scipio decide to ride on that thing? I know that he wants to be older, to be taken seriously, blah blah blah. It still seems like a stupid thing to do.

Then, they become cruel and turn their enemy into a five year old. That seems like a bit of a bad-guy move to me. Which leads me to my final merry-go-round complaint, which is that they totally could have glued the wing back on once Barbarossa kicked it off. They did it to the other wing, didn't they?

So that spoiled the last bit of the book for me.

Then, I felt as though the ending was a bit unsatisfactory. The gang split up, and they'll never again have the same kind of bond that they did when they were living together in the movie theatre. That's sad to me.

Then- and this is what I'm really angry about- there was no romance at all! I mean, I know that these kids are twelve or whatever, but I was totally expecting something at the end. I was shipping Prosper and Hornet sooooo hard at the end there, and the author didn't even give their relationship a mention. I'm so pissed about that.

And on top of that! I may or may not have looked this up online to find that everyone ships Scipio and Hornet, which wouldn't work at all! GAAAAAH!

...

You know, really, I usually don't get into these ships much. But god I wanted that one!

Still, The Thief Lord was a solid story until things got disappointing at the end. 7.5/10 stars.

Thanks for reading,

-Mark

PS: Now I want to go onto Fanfiction.net or something and write Prosper and Hornet up a scene. No hardcore sex, don't worry. I just want them to have a moment, you know???