One of the challenges for this year’s Book Riot Read Harder Challenge is to read one of your favorite author’s favorite books. There are a few authors whom I endeavor to read everything they’ve ever written: Ilona Andrews, Penny Reid, and Sarah J. Maas to name a few. Literally, anything that any of these authors write must be on my shelf immediately.

So for this challenge, I picked one of Sarah J. Maas’ favorite books: The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner.

This book apparently came out in 1996 which surprised me because this is the type of book that little old me would have eaten up if I’d found it as a kid. Hell, this is a story that thirty year old me ate up.

The story reminds me of A Thousand and One Nights which is a classic that I must have read a thousand and one times as a kid. Specifically, the tale of Aladdin.

A thief is taken to a cave to recover a mysterious artifact. If they take too long in the cave, they will die. In fact, the bones of the other overzealous thiefs who came before them are in the cave as a reminder of what will happen if they fail.

Whenever a character with dubious morality is the main character, the story just feels more complex. You are rooting for the person that breaks the law, that breaks the rules.

The character development is *chef’s kiss*. The journey to get to the cave takes a long enough time that you are invested in the well being of all of the characters, even those that are more villianous.

This is the first book in a series that I still can’t believe I had never heard of before this challenge. Excuse me while I hide in my apartment and read all six of the books in this series.