Margaret Owen Books

Margaret Owen was born and raised at the end of the Oregon Trail, worked everything from thrift stores to presidential campaigns, and now writes from Seattle. Her debut, The Merciful Crow (2019), announced her preoccupations immediately: it follows Fie, a young chief of the Crow caste, the untouchable body-collectors of a plague-ridden kingdom, as she drags a runaway prince across hostile country. The duology, completed by The Faithless Hawk (2020), was an NPR Best Book of the Year, a Tor.com best of the year, and a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults selection. It is angry, propulsive fantasy about class, and it earned a devoted readership without a drop of glamour.

Her second series made her a bestseller. Little Thieves (2021), an instant indie bestseller with five starred reviews, retells the Grimm tale of the goose girl from the villain's perspective: Vanja, the maid who stole the princess's face and life, and who narrates with the best con-artist voice in modern YA. Painted Devils (2023) and the trilogy's finale, Holy Terrors (April 2025), complete the story. The middle book somehow makes accidentally starting a cult funny, tender, and structurally airtight, and the finale sticks the landing, closing Vanja and Emeric's story with the New York Times bestseller status the series deserved.

What defines Owen is voice plus fury. Her narrators are self-sabotaging girls who lie to everyone, especially themselves, and she pairs that interiority with genuinely radical worldbuilding: gods that answer to belief, castes maintained by convenience, justice systems that mostly protect power. She is also very funny. Vanja's footnotes and schemes read like a heist movie narrated by its least reliable participant. And underneath, her constant theme is found family: every series builds one from scraps, reluctantly, and means it.

The romance in her books deserves specific praise. Vanja and Emeric, the junior investigator sworn to prosecute her, are one of YA's great slow burn pairings, adversaries who fall for each other's competence. Owen writes attraction as attention: he notices her tells, she memorizes his tics, and by the time anything happens you are feral for it. Heat-wise she pushes the YA ceiling harder than most. Painted Devils includes a frank, warmly handled intimate scene, unusual for the category, landing her around 2 on our spice scale. Nothing explicit, but the desire is on the page and treated as healthy rather than shameful, which frankly more YA could stand to do.

For romantasy readers, Owen is the YA author most worth your time if you love morally gray heroines but are tired of them being secretly soft. Vanja does real harm, pays real costs, and earns her growth. The gods-and-bargains architecture of Little Thieves also scratches the same itch as adult deal-with-a-death-god romantasy, minus the explicit content and plus better jokes. She works beautifully as a palate cleanser between heavier adult series, or as a main course if voice matters more to you than heat.

A note on the craft, because Owen is doing more under the hood than the jokes suggest. The Little Thieves books are structured as actual mysteries with fair-play clues, the fairy-tale bones are load-bearing rather than decorative, and the trilogy quietly builds a theology across three books that pays off in Holy Terrors. She also handles queerness with a matter-of-fact generosity; her worlds include queer, trans, and nonbinary characters whose arcs are about their choices, not their identities, and Vanja's own messy relationship with her body and worth is written with unusual honesty for the category. It is rare to find books this funny that are also this careful, and readers who inhale the trilogy tend to come out of it evangelizing.

Start with Little Thieves; it is her best book and one of the best YA fantasies of its decade. Read the trilogy in order through Painted Devils and Holy Terrors. Then circle back to The Merciful Crow and The Faithless Hawk for something grimmer and faster. Both series are complete, so you can binge without cliffhanger risk. Bring snacks for the gods; they are always hungry.