For a nine-year-old, Skate has the mind and attitude of a teenager, so it's difficult to visualise a child but for her dialogue and writing. Skate only wants one thing: books. It doesn't matter where she is, that is her one motivation. A tough book to get into, but ideal for teenagers and - possibly - young adults.


I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review. ( )

For a nine-year-old, Skate has the mind and attitude of a teenager, so it's difficult to visualise a child but for her dialogue and writing. Skate only wants one thing: books. It doesn't matter where she is, that is her one motivation. A tough book to get into, but ideal for teenagers and - possibly - young adults.


I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review. ( )

Skate The Thief is the first book in the "Rag and Bone Chronicles" by Jeff Ayers. This book is about a young girl called Skate, who is a thief. She was trained to be a thief by the local crime syndicate, the Ink. Skate makes an erroneous decision to try and steal from the shop of a powerful undead wizard. He makes a deal with her. She gets a safe place to stay but must steal books from other wizards.

It's my first time reading any of Ayer's books and I really enjoyed his writing style. While there were parts that were slow at times, the whole book was a really engaging read. I loved Skate, smart, resourceful and her relationship with the wizard was the highlight of the book for me. Will definitely be reading the rest in the series ( )

I really liked this book. I want to clarify that at the beginning, because this is going to sound critical, but this book is a good book and if I had had the chance to read it when I was 12 it would have pressed all the buttons for the kind of book I enjoyed at the time.

Skate is a thief, a member of a guild of thieves who gets caught on a job and then manages to get invited to live with her intended victim, in return for which she will steal some things he wants. A nice setup. Her captor/employer has some mysteries about him, some of which come out fairly quickly and some of which develop over the book. Skate's uncovering of those is fun and interesting.

But I had two issues:

1. I had a hard time sympathizing with Skate. Her priorities seemed really weird to me. She has intense loyalty to the thieves guild, which seems to have little loyalty to her (and she is well aware of this). She seems very committed to the idea that she should work on working her way up in the guild, even as a whole different kind of life is clearly open in front of her as a possibility. Maybe this is because she's a kid, and she doesn't see that possibility. Maybe I'm too old. But it was hard to remember that her priorities were so out of line with what it felt like I would do. Because she felt like an unsympathetic character, I didn't experience the feeling of seamlessness in between the writing and the vision I had of her in my head. I was always having to adjust the vision in my head because her choices were so much out of line with what I was expecting.

2. The book is very long for how much is going on. There are things which seem to have all kinds of foreshadowing in them but by the time you have worked yourself through more of the book you've forgotten them (in this case the ebook format for reading is terrible, because it is not easy to just flip back a few chapters without losing your place and all sense of where you are in the book). When I read this book I was in the middle of some fairly intense work, so I would have time to read one chapter, then a few days with no time, and then time for another chapter, and in that process the book felt endless and disjointed while I was reading it. When I was a kid and had a lot of time for reading, I would have read it mostly in large chunks, reading for half a day or longer at a stretch, and then I would have re-read the book immediately, and such a detailed book with so much stuff in it would have been a gift that kept on giving, even with an unsympathetic main character. But I was struggling to understand Skate as a character, and also struggling to keep up with the meandering story line.

I did enjoy the book, will definitely be re-reading it, and have recommended it to a couple people, especially tweenagers who are into fantasy fiction. It's definitively in the Young Adult realm, and the writing doesn't include any really intense emotional moments, though there are some somewhat heavy themes in the captor/employer's backstory are war and what one does in war. ( )

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review, and let me tell you that I honestly loved it. There were some parts that kind of dragged, and the beginning was kind of slow, but I don't care. I'm probably going to buy a copy of this book to help sales to make sure there is a book 2. Gah! So good! ( )