The Thief Lord

The Thief Lord (2002) by Cornelia Funke is a young adult novel set in Venice. It centers on two boys, Bo and Prosper, who run away after their mother dies. Their aunt (their mother's sister) wants to adopt the five-year-old Bo, but makes it clear that she is not interested in the twelve-year-old Prosper, who will be shipped off to a boarding school. The runaways make their way to Venice, their mother's favorite city, and become a part of a community of homeless children, Hornet, Mosca, and Hedgehog. These children have a benefactor, Scipo, the Thief Lord, a slightly older boy of the Artful Dodger type, who steals for their sustenance. The Thief Lord is a mysterious figure. The children all worship him, except for Hornet, the only girl, who is not afraid to challenge the Thief Lord's strange rules.

The Thief Lord is one of those YA books in which the adults are only nominal. They do not act like mature adults and become tools of the children, working for the children's goals—no matter how far fetched—by smoothing the way for the children with authority figures, with financial support, with transportation or similar "adult" roles. Now, in most YA books, adults are must be absent or really stupid; otherwise the young adult characters would never have any agency at all. However, The Thief Lord seems more disingenuous than most in the way that the adult characters, who are treated horribly by the children, are so easily swayed by a pack of juvenile delinquents (no matter how smart and adorable they are).

The fantasy elements come very late in the book, and for a while, I was wondering if I had made a mistake in adding it to WWE. I believe that much more should have been done with the fantasy elements, by way of making them more believable in a novel whose initial three-fourths contains no fantasy elements at all (even though the reader needs to expend a lot of willing suspension of disbelief concerning the children's way of life and the actions of the adults). Also, when the fantasy elements cause significant changes, the characters are too excepting of those changes and there not nearly enough discussion about them.

Having said all of this, The Thief Lord is a fun book. Funke creates likeable characters, and I was always rooting for Bo and Prosper. The secondary children are also interesting creations. However, this is one of those books that you just have to accept and go with the world it creates. Don't ask too many questions, and don't think too much as you read.