The Thief Lord

A rare YA book that I find charming and relatable.

I guess I find most YA books these days extremely pedantic and prim. It's like we're fighting the culture war on them? I mean, we are. But it's so very, very moral. Are you Left or are you Right?! I only read the leftist ones, and they're... fine. The way Daniel Tiger is fine. Like, it's good. Daniel Tiger teaches important social-emotional skills. But BOY OH BOY is it a slog of moralizing pedantry. Sing-song “when you get frustrated, take a deep breath, and count to 4!” Or “saying sorry is the first step - then, how can I help?!” My God.

What I yearn for, then, is amoral, imaginative, weirdo YA fiction and children's stories. Take Heidi, for example. The anime. In Heidi, shit is sometimes grim (her parents are dead, indeed, and her forced-parent grandfather is a real grump), and emotions are certainly acknowledged and real, but we're not, like, in a cognitive behavioral therapy session. Ooh, here's a very Jonathan Haidt theory: maybe all this focus on “how can I help?!” and “take a deep breath” and assuming we need to stop and pause and socially-emotionally learn everything is making the kids fragile?! The Death of Resilience?! Maybe the culture will swing back and we'll start re-emphasizing self-sufficiency and resilience and “yeah, life is shit sometimes, oh well, learn to get over it”.

ALL THAT TO SAY. I think I enjoyed this because this is actually a quite grim, Roald Dahl-esque tale of people being grotesque to each other, told through the eyes of innocent, not-always-well-meaning kids. Prosper and Boniface Hartlieb are two German brothers and runaways. Their (single?) mother has just died, and their quite terrible aunt and uncle want to adopt Bo (cuz he's 5 and thus a cute “teddy bear”) and dump Prosper in a boarding school. Their mom was apparently a big-time romantic, who filled their heads with tales of Venice's glory. So they flee there - jumping trains from Hanover (or was it Hamburg?) to Venice.

They land in the city of canals in the year 2000 - aka, cell phones but ALSO fax machines. Flooding, pigeon shit, AND SO MANY TOURISTS. They take up with a gang of street children led by a charismatic, snobby little peacock named Scipio, who calls himself the Thief Lord - so wily are his break-ins.

Plot #1: Prosper and Bo's aunt and uncle enlist the services of a cheapo detective to come hunting for the kids.
Plot #2: A mysterious “Conte” (Count) hires the Thief Lord to steal a mysterious piece of wood for a mysterious purpose. Such mystery!

So I enjoyed this quite a bit, especially more and more as the story went on. I just, like, APPRECIATED FUNKE'S CHOICES, MAN. e.g. There was something Studio Ghibli-ish about how independent and resilient the kids are; they are just making their way, man. I also appreciated that villainy was MOSTLY not one-note (with two notable exceptions) - like, I was surprised and delighted by how some of the characters came around and were welcomed. The book also jumps the shark a bit towards the end, but I was 100% here for it - it aligned with the general fantasy-ness of being a kid.

I listened to this as an audiobook with a talented and very English narrator; I would have LOVED to have heard this in Italian, since I think that would have really set the scene more - especially with the Venetian accents and German accents and so on. Apparently they made this into a movie in the mid 2000s?