FernFolio

Following the death of their mother, fifteen-year old Prosper takes his five-year old brother, Bo, and sneaks onto a train bound for Venice, a place neither boy has ever visited but that looms large in both their imaginations because of their mother’s stories.  He is desperate to get them far from Germany and their aunt Esther Hartlieb, who is determined to adopt the angelic-looking Bo, but who is not interested in his teenaged brother.
Once in Venice, the boys are taken in by a gang of street kids who live in an abandoned cinema, and survive by picking the pockets of wealthy tourists and with the help and support of the mysterious Thief Lord.  The Thief Lord, no more than a teenager himself, calls himself Scipio and supplies them with money and goods, some of the profits of his thefts from the great palazzos of Venice.  Scipio doesn’t live with the others in the cinema but arrives, masked and cloaked in a black cape, to pay them visits there at odd hours of the night, bringing money and food and books and clothes.
Prosper and Bo rapidly grow accustomed to their new lives with Ricco, Mosca, and Hornet, and come to love Venice, an ancient city of maze-like streets and canals built on a series of islands in the Adriatic off the northeast coast of Italy.  Though Prosper worries about his friends’ illegal activities and constantly lives in fear of being found by aunt Esther, Bo revels in the freedom and adventure of their new lives.
Then one day, Prosper bumps into a man with a walrus moustache, a man who takes a good look at him, and then seems to follow when he and the boys start making their way back to the cinema for the evening.  The man, a detective named Victor Getz, has been hired by Prosper and Bo’s aunt Esther to find Bo so that she can take him back to Germany.  Prosper and his friends lose the stranger, but the boy’s suspicions grow when he sees the man standing at the water taxi dock, as their boat puts out into the Grand Canal.  Fearing the worst, Prosper disguises himself and Bo, and gets Ricco and the others to help him keep Bo from view, yet Victor proves more than a match for a handful of ragtag street kids and their elusive teenaged protector.
Burdened with providing for and protecting his friends, as well as growing personal troubles of his own, Scipio needs a lot of money.  When he and his gang are offered a fortune by an elderly Conte to steal a broken wing made of wood from a private house in Venice, Scipio accepts the strange request but, before the theft can be carried out, an unexpected revelation rocks the Thief Lord’s gang and threatens the safety of every one of the kids living in the Stella cinema.  The burglary doesn’t go according to plan.  Caught by Ida Spavento, the woman who owns the house, and the wooden wing, pursued by Victor Getz, and his client, Esther Hartlieb, and hunted by the local police, the gang must pull together all of their resources to save themselves and their friends.
Written by the wonderful Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord is a magical tale that explores the themes of family and friendship, poverty and wealth, and childhood and old age against the richly detailed backdrop of Venice, one of the proudest and most beautiful cities in the world.
FernFolio Editor