The Good Thief (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: mousetrap girls, hannah tinti, mousetrap factory, Doctor Milton, Father John, Sister Agnes (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

This striking debut novel is an homage to old-fashioned boys-own adventure stories, and unfolds like a Robert Louis Stevenson tale retold amid the hardscrabble squalor of Colonial New England. The sheer strangeness of the story is beguiling: a one-handed boy, tainted by his upbringing in a Catholic orphanage and with little to offer but a head full of lice, is adopted by a con artist, and enters an underworld of ruthless mousetrap-manufacturing barons, feisty chimney-dwelling dwarves, and, perhaps most terrifying of all, black-market dentists. In keeping with the gothic tradition, Tinti writes with an arch, almost camp sensibility. While on a nocturnal grave-digging excursion to procure bodies for a crazy scientist, for instance, the pair encounter an assassin, who tells the twelve-year-old hero that he was made for killing. Will the boy ever discover the truth of his past? Its good fun watching him find out.
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Ron Charles

It may be too quaint to imagine there are still families reading aloud together at night (so many Web sites, so little time), but if you're out there, consider Hannah Tinti's charming first novel. Set in the dark woods of 19th-century New England, The Good Thief follows a bright, one-handed orphan through enough harrowing scrapes and turns to satisfy your inner Dickens. That Tinti is the young co-founder and editor of super-hip One Story magazine makes the arrival of this old-fashioned adventure all the more surprising.

Her hero is a tender but wary 12-year-old named Ren, who's lived in the Saint Anthony's orphanage since he was dropped off during the night as an infant. Every few months, he and his buddies line up for anyone who might want a child or a cheap laborer. The boys know that if they don't get adopted by neighborhood farmers they'll eventually be consigned to the army and certain death. But who would want a one-handed child?

Ren's plight is creaky with sentimentality, but Tinti knows how to keep her balance as she steps through these hoary conventions of Victorian melodrama. By the time she finishes describing Ren's little collection of stolen objects and his muted despair, I wanted to sign the adoption papers myself.

But, of course, someone does come for him, just as he's always dreamed. His long-lost brother, Benjamin Nab, has been looking for Ren since their father took them West. Their family was attacked by Indians, Benjamin tells the priest, and in the heat of combat, Ren's mother accidentally chopped off his hand. Benjamin saved his baby brother, passed him along to travelers, and then went back to exact revenge on those Indians.

Naturally, nothing about Benjamin's tale is true, but let the adventure begin!

The key to Tinti's success with this novel is the constant tension between tenderness and peril, a tension that she ratchets up until the final pages. Ren suspects he's been adopted under false pretenses, and, what's worse, as they leave Saint Anthony's, he learns that Benjamin picked him because his handicap is just the right prop for his new guardian's treacly lies and con games. "That hand of yours is going to open wallets faster than any gun," Benjamin brags as they set off into the forest looking for soft hearts.

"Sometimes Benjamin repeated the story of their mother and the Indian," Tinti writes. "Other times it was a lion who'd eaten Ren's hand, or a snapping turtle as he dangled his fingers in a stream." Indeed, Benjamin's alacrity with a lie is one of the great comic wonders of The Good Thief. "I understand you've been raised with a different set of rules," Benjamin says, "but if you want to stay alive out here you're going to be forced to break them. Know what you need, and if it crosses your path, take it." Can this scoundrel care for a boy who knows nothing of the world beyond what the priests and the Bible have taught him?

Tinti never lets us relax, even as absurdities pile up delightfully. When Benjamin and Ren arrive at the grim, aptly named town of North Umbrage, the story grows both more humorous and more ominous. The town is dominated by a smoke-belching mousetrap factory, staffed by a great army of scurrying young women. Benjamin is nervous about settling here, but he can't resist the lucrative grave-robbing opportunities, which quickly give way to an even richer trade in dead bodies for the local research hospital.

Ren finds all this terrifying, and for good reason. What he wants most in the world, though, is a family, and slowly he cobbles together one that includes a friendly giant whose only talent is murdering people, a mysterious dwarf who lives on the roof, and a lonely deaf woman who yells at them constantly.

Their antics take place in a slightly surreal world where cause and effect are only tangentially related. Even the story's pacing seems dreamlike, static and panicked at the same time. We never know much more than Ren does about what's happening, but he's deeply serious about learning to do what's right even though everyone around him is engaged in criminal activity of one sort or another. "He could feel God's eye upon him," Tinti writes, "like a pointed stick at the back of his neck."

Before this is all over, you can bet there are shocking murders, close scrapes, rooftop chases and last-minute escapes. But what's most enjoyable is watching Tinti draw all these crazy elements together with Ren's destiny. The dark secret of his past could destroy his last chance for happiness, or -- just maybe -- it could lead to the family he never had.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: The Dial Press; 1 edition (August 26, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385337450
• ISBN-13: 978-0385337458
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (135 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #255,288 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Fantastic Thief, August 6, 2008

By	Stephanie Crawford (Las Vegas, NV) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

I've always had a soft spot for literature and films that deal with orphans on grand adventures (film-wise my favorites are probably The Devil's Backbone and The City of Lost Children) and "The Good Thief" is definitely on par with the best of the best in the genre. Our hero is Ren, a fairly withdrawn orphan who is missing his left hand- he's not aware of how- who longs for a caring family of his own. His life in a Catholic orphanage/monastery is not easy, as expected, but also not tragic. It would be easy for the author to make it a maudlin tale of a young deformed boy under the rule of abusive priests- instead Tinti paints very character with empathy along with pathos.

When a young man named Benjamin arrives at the orphanage and picks Ren out of a line-up with a story of them being brothers, Ren's hope overrules his suspicions. Benjamin weaves a tale of a father who lived a high adventure and the tragic (but exciting) circumstances that took their parents away. However, Ren quickly discovers Benjamin is a skilled liar, and instead of being taken to a warm homestead they quickly fall into a pattern of theft, law breaking and compulsive lies.

From page one the story pulled me in with an almost old-fashioned kind of storytelling. Every character is deeply flawed but never wholly a villian, and the way Ren is almost immediately surrounded by a motley cast of characters feels natural. Everytime some awful event happened to Ren I was torn between wanting to cry out "Oh c'mon, give the kid a break!" and turning the pages even faster to find out how he'd use his bravery and natural intelligence to survive it.

There are twists to the story, twists that felt like the weird machinations in life rather than manipulated fictional climaxes. Tinti leaves no loose ends, but every small ending felt natural and earned. The book has been compared to Dickens and I think that's a fair comparison, though Tinti has found a beautiful way of using centuries of storytelling to weave a tale that somehow feels both comfortably worn and very modern and unique. For those who enjoy well-told tales and dark adventures with a big, beating heart in the center- I can't recommend "The Good Thief" enough.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, ultimately disappointing, August 5, 2008

By	Flo (California) - See all my reviews

(What's this?)

12-year old Ren lives at an orphanage in what is likely New England in a undefined 19th-century time period probably before the Civil War. Like most of the boys at the orphanage, Ren was abandoned as a baby. The only trace of his heritage are the clothes in which he was wrapped, the collar of which bore the initials R.E.N - hence his name. Adding to the mystery is the fact that he is missing a hand.

It's easy enough to "adopt" the boys -- money changing hands and a somewhat convincing story is enough for the Brothers who run the place -- but Ren's missing hand has kept him from finding the home he desperately wants until a young man named Benjamin Nab, who claims to be his long-lost brother, whisks him away.

But Nab is a con man, not Ren's brother at all. The missing hand first becomes a means by which Nab and his partner Tom can fleece the well-meaning and unsuspecting. Despite his good heart, however, Ren's time in the hardscrabble orphanage has also made him a good thief. He becomes a willing accomplice in Benjamin and Tom's increasingly desperate schemes until he meets two people who help him redefine the meaning of "family."

"The Good Thief" is a beautifully written book, lyrical in parts. Tinti does a fine job describing just how hard life could be for the poor and dispossessed, children especially. The smallest things - a shiny rock, a long-broken toy, a book - take on huge meaning for Ren and so for us. There is a lot to like in the way the book is written.

What makes "The Good Thief" disappointing is its ultimately farfetched plot. Like "Smilla's Sense of Snow" for example, "Thief" is wonderfully set up in the first half, only to careen out of control towards the end. A bizarre villain in a company town run amock rob Ren - and the reader - of what could have been a very satisfying and thoughtful ending.

26 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An almost-great first novel falls prey to new-author traps, September 4, 2008

By	Jacquelyn Gill "Reader By The Lake" (Madison, WI) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

I was initially intrigued by the premise of The Good Thief; an orphan with a missing hand, a mysterious past, and an historical New England setting seemed like a solid combination. At first, I thought I'd found a solid first novel, and one that had a lot to offer the over-crowded young adult fiction section.

But The Good Thief isn't a young adult novel - or is it? I waffled back and forth between the evidence: a simplistic, almost fable-like writing style, a young child protagonist, and a bit of adventure and even mysticism thrown in suggested that this book would be best enjoyed by the YA crowd. Suggestive content and a lack of character development (strong characters are often the strength of YA novels) and a convoluted plot suggest otherwise. Frankly, it's as though Tinti simply couldn't make up her mind as to what kind of novel she wanted to write, and her editors did her a serious disservice by not guiding her onto one path or the other. This would have been a perfectly delightful YA book, but some of Tinti's choices make it seem like she was deliberately avoiding that path, and the story really suffers for it.

Perhaps most perplexing is the plot; at times bordering on random, readers may sense Tinti's desire to branch into magical realism, but she's never brave enough to fully make the plunge. She makes a few historical errors (e.g., twins weren't killed in 1800's New England, and tarring and feathering was fatal), and her setting never feels quite believable. One gets the sense that the fault is not so much with the novelist, but with the editor; some guidance here and there would have made this a much tighter novel, and eliminated distracting errors.

Tinti is not only working with rich material ("resurrection men" and orphans are just plain fun to read about), but she also delves into more heady subjects, like what it means to be good. If you suspend your disbelief and power through when the plot starts to feel a bit over the top, there's enough talent and ability here to make for a fun read.