*Trigger warnings: discussions of child abuse, abusive environments, and trauma from a past attempted assault.*

“Once upon a time, there was a girl as cunning as the fox in winter, as hungry as the wolf at first frost, and cold as the icy wind that kept them at each other’s throats.”

Vanja is a girl who was given up by her mother to the gods Death and Fortune who have raised her as their own daughter. However, everything comes with a price and now that she is 16 she has only until her 17th birthday to decide which mother she will choose to serve in return for them raising and loving her. Vanja doesn’t want to serve them, she wants to be a daughter not a servant. Vanja decides that the only solution is to raise enough money to run far away from her mothers and live out the rest of her life... and has turned to a life of thieving from the rich aristocrats while pretending to be a princess ( she secretly stole the identity and life of a princess she once served and is using said princess’s magical pearl necklace that essentially just transforms her into a beauty). On one of her jewel heists, she accidentally steals a token from a god and is cursed with only 2 weeks to figure out how to undo it or die. The curse: her body starts turning into jewels, stone by stone, to reflect her greed and she must find a way to pay back her greed or die as a pile of jewels. Vanja must figure out how to break the curse and on top of that a investigative junior detective is on her trail (her secret identity as a jewel thief) and the princess’s fiancee a man twice her age who is power hungry and abusive has come back in town and is over eager to fast track the marriage. From the beginning of the story it is established that Vanja is not a good person, everything she does, she does for herself and that she is a morally grey character. There were a lot of plot arcs (detective plot, princess marriage plot, god-mothers plot, etc) going on in this story and Vanja isn’t exactly the most likable protagonist (which is odd for me since I generally adore morally grey protagonist but I just couldn’t like Vanja that much, she’s even a jewel thief which would generally makes her more likable in my eyes, and yet I just didn’t like her as much as I had hoped). The story felt like it was dragging on for a bit and by the halfway point I just wasn’t as invested in the characters or the story as I would have hoped. It started off great but lost me along the way. Theres a bit of romance, and my favorite character would have to be the daughter of one of the gods who is a shapeshifter, Ragne (she was just the best part of the book for me).

*Thanks Netgalley and Macmillan Children's Publishing Group for sending me an arc in exchange for an honest review*