The Good Thief Book

Don't believe anyone who tells you anything good about this book. The reviews on the back cover will be the first lies you'll have to ignore. This book belongs in a trash can. You should thank me, because I've done the hard work of reading it so you don't have to.

The Good Thief (aka, The Bad Book) is meant to be a historical fiction novel for adults that tells the coming-of-age story of a 12 year-old orphan boy who learns to live with a pair of rough and tumble thieves in early 1800s America. Sounds somewhat intriguing, right? But don't get too excited. As a piece of historical fiction, this book fails almost every test: Did the author do enough research? No. Did she do a good job of making you get a sense of the time period, through skillful use of details and general ambience? No. Did the author call up a vivid sense of place or historical moment? Absolutely not. Did she tie in the action to the larger political or social events of the time? Nope. As far as the reader is concerned, this story is taking place in a social and political vacuum, in a non-descript area that has some trees. Ok, so maybe this is just supposed to be an adventure story that happens to take place in the past. That's cool. But the adventure is not even the sort that we care about. Oh no! A band of mysterious men wearing HATS (of all things!) is chasing after the group! They seem to have an aura of fear around them, which is somehow connected to their HATS! (The hats are totally irrelevant, as it turns out.) Oh no, the main characters are robbing graves to make money! Creeeeepy! (Not really.) Oh no, Ren stole something! (But it's ok because he's nice to horses and thus not really a bad person at all!)

Ok, so perhaps this novel fails as historical fiction and fails as adventure. But maybe it could still succeed as a poignant coming-of-age tale? The only hitch there is that the main character never actually grows up. By the end of the story, he's still a dirty orphan who mistreats his two childhood friends, still doesn't have a clear sense of his place in the world, and isn't nearly as moral as the author would have us believe. He's just a self-absorbed, snotty little kid. His coming-of-age consisted of learning that the moral rules of the real world outside his Catholic orphanage were more pliable than he imagined. Whoo. So he became a street punk -- and not even a charming one at that. That hardly qualifies as a poignant coming-of-age story, in my opinion. Reviewers kept comparing him to Huck Finn and Oliver Twist, which either means they haven't read the novels that those characters come from and just want to sound smart, or they think all boys who have adventures away from their parents are somehow all alike.

So this book fails every test we can think of for the genres that it taps into. But, a charitable reader might think, perhaps the book has a good message to make up for it!

The "message" of the story (such as it is) is that people society normally considers bad (like thieves and murderers and grave robbers) can have good, warm hearts and hardy friendships. The only problem is that we never actually get any evidence that these guys have good, warm hearts, and their relationships with each other aren't very deep or meaningful. The only time the main character, Ren, is ever kind is when dealing with the group's horse. In fact, whenever the action is getting too "manly" or "rough," the author will have Ren reflect fondly on the horse as a way of making him a sympathetic character. It's the classic "you can trust this character because they're nice to animals!" trope, and Ren's goodness doesn't go much beyond that. But Ren is nice to horses AND he steals things -- what rich ambiguity! It's as though the author was using the formula "good" + "thief" = complex character. Oooh, and it makes a nice, catchy title for the book: The Good Thief! Get it, because he's a thief, but he's also just a plain old good guy? The world is full of all kinds of interesting folks!

But perhaps, you might want to ask, the story has a good villain? Well, I already mentioned the pointless Hat Men who stalk the countryside being ineffective and hatty. But there's also a fat Irishman in a yellow suit who owns a mousetrap factory, which you know is evil because it pumps black smoke into the sky! BWHAHAHAHAHAHA! You thought you had seen it all! This guy is like a mustache-twirling villain from a Disney straight-to-DVD movie about plucky children outwitting the rotund and mean factory owner, who stands there watching the mousetraps piling up and rubbing his sweaty hands with glee. He's about as flat a villain as you could ask for, and him being Irish, or the fact that he makes mousetraps, or his weird candy fetish, never actually have any bearing on the story.

And then there's the dwarf. The roof-dwelling dwarf who makes toys out of wood. The dwarf who serves absolutely no purpose in the story. I am at a loss to explain this character's presence in the story. He's the brother of a crazy landlady, and he eats preserves out of jars and reads fancy books in his shack on top of a roof. And I think I'll leave it at that. I just wanted to warn you that if you do read this book against my warnings, be prepared for a Pointless Dwarf.

Between the Irish mousetrap guy and the dwarf, I thought I might have accidentally stumbled into a piece of children's literature, despite the fact that I found the book in the normal fiction section of the bookstore. Here's the thing: this book won the Alex Award, which is given to books intended for adults, but that have a "special appeal" for teens and children. I think by "special appeal for teens and children" they mean simplistic writing that middle schoolers can easily follow and a plot that's about as rich and nuanced as a made-for-TV kids' adventure movie. Tinti's writing style is about as skull-crushingly pedestrian as it comes. Here's my re-enactment of her narrative style for you: "First the characters did this. Then they did this. After that, they went here. Then they went there. Suddenly, this happened. Then they all did this. And then they found a place to sleep for the night." I don't think Tinti had discovered the subordinate clause by the time she wrote this, but perhaps for her second novel, she'll have learned what those fancy "clauses" are all about.

This book is amazing. Here are all the things that amaze me about it: I'm amazed it is actually considered an adult book; I'm amazed it made it through the front door of an editor's office and into the real world, rather than being quietly dropped down a garbage chute; I'm amazed that people (including me) have paid money for this book; and I'm amazed that reputable newspapers have given it good reviews and that some organizations actually felt it deserved awards. Simply amazing.