The Magic Thief

The Magic Thief
by Sarah Prineas
Recommended Ages: 10+

Conn – his full name, Connwaer, means blackbird – is a scruffy gutterboy, pickpocket and lock picker in the city of Wellmet, a place where a river divides the haves (the Sunrise) from the have-nots (the Twilight). Effectively, it's two cities, and Connwaer belongs firmly in the latter. The Underlord of the Twilight has a word out for him, which means that if the crime boss of the poor side of the city catches up with him, he'll be beaten or, probably, worse. With no surviving parents to look out for him, Conn lives by his wits, stealing enough to eat every two or three days and looking for abandoned buildings to sleep in. It's a cold, hungry, anxious kind of life, but somehow he's made it to the age of – well, somewhere between 12 and 14, he supposes – when he makes the mistake that changes his life.

The pocket he picks happens to belong to Nevery Flinglas, a wizard who is back in town after 20 years of exile. The item he steals happens to be Nevery's locus magicalicus – a phrase you'll get used to as this story unfolds, meaning a stone that connects a wizard to the source of a city's magic. When Nevery catches up with Conn, he's amazed to find the boy still alive; touching a wizard's locus stone is that dangerous. Putting two and two together, Nevery realizes that Conn is a wizard, and reluctantly takes him on – at first as a servant, later as an apprentice – along with a mountain of hired muscle named Benet. The three set up housekeeping in a ruined house called Heartsease, on an island in the river, and while Conn starts to learn magic even without his own locus stone, Nevery asserts his control over the local magisterium – basically, the council of wizards – and begins investigating why the magic seems to be draining out of Wellmet.

Learning magic is hard when you don't know how to read, but Conn is a quick study. More seriously, he still hasn't found his locus stone, and the magisters have given him a month to do so. As the deadline ticks down, the sometime thief – once and always, rather – resorts to desperate measures that get him into big trouble. Now he has powerful enemies and needs to watch his every move. Unfortunately, he also has trouble convincing Nevery to listen to his theory about what the city's magic is – not a resource to be exploited, but a living being to be negotiated with – and why it is in danger. With powerful forces working against him and even Nevery too stubborn to listen, it's up to Conn to save the city's magic the way he's done everything in his life: alone.

Packaged and illustrated like a children's story, this book and its two immediate sequels appeared before me at a local bookstore, and I decided to try it and decide later whether to buy books 2 and 3. Well, I tried it, couldn't put it down, and went back the next day to buy the other two. I was flabbergasted that a book presented as something so trifling and commercial, with a title reminiscent of several other books, could actually turn out to have so much heart, to say nothing of building a unique fantasy world worthy of an epic adventure. It joins an economy of words with a distinctive style; you won't be able to mistake Conn's way of expressing himself for anyone else's. And so it manages, in its brief length, to accomplish an impressive job of world building, tell a complete story, elicit laughter and other strong emotions, and leave you panting for more.

This is the first of four "Magic Thief" books (plus a short story) by the Iowa-based author of the "Winterling" trilogy, two "Ash & Bramble" books, two "Trouble in the Stars" books, the novels The Scroll of Kings and Dragonfell, and an installment in the multi-author series "Spirit Animals: Fall of the Beasts." Sequels to this book are titled Lost, Found and Home.