Thank you NetGalley for the arc.

Honestly the only characters I cared about were Ryia and Evelyn. In my opinion they were the most developed characters, and the book definitely centered around them(specifically Ryia) more than anyone else. The only problem with that is the fact that all the other characters(Nash, Ivan, and Tristan) didn't get that much development. They were given motives and backstories(to an extent), but I just didn't care about them.

Ryia and Evelyn's relationship was really well done. The development from enemies to reluctant allies to sort of friends with feelings for each other was excellent. The author made a good decision to stop them from getting together at the end of the book while making it clear they had feelings for each other. Their relationship was one of the few aspects of the books that I wholeheartedly enjoyed, and it's honestly what got me through it in the first place. That being said, Nash and Ivan's relationship wasn't given the same amount of attention. Their feelings for one another were implied throughout the novel, but I found it incredibly hard to connect to them regardless. It didn't help that Ivan and Nash didn't get that many chapters, specifically Ivan.

The plot of the book was interesting, specifically when it centered around Ryia, but it didn't really get good until about halfway through. The beginning quarter of the book was especially slow, and it's the main reason I put it off so long. As much as I was curious to see how it finished, I found it hard to connect to the different stories of each character(specifically Ivan, Nash, and Tristan), because of the lack of attention they got. Tristan's backstory was especially hard to get behind because although he had a fair amount of POVs for the first third or so of the book, he didn't get anymore until the last fifth of it. I honestly forgot about his story by the time he was "reintroduced".

Overall, I enjoyed the book very much, and I look forward to what happens next.

4 stars

From the first chapter, Among Thieves became my favorite fantasy debut of 2021. This book was captivating from the start. A mix of Six of Crows and Lies of Locke Lamora, which just happens to be two of my favorite series. It's a good combination of both, but it stands on its own.

A group of criminals band together to do the impossible. Each member of the group has their own hidden agenda which added so much suspense. I love a good ensemble cast and this one was no exception. I do hope each character gets a turn to be the focal point. As I would just love to learn more about them all.

Now can we have the next book, please? That ending was cruel.

this was such a fun read! i adored the characters and their relationships with each other. also, the world was unique and exciting, i felt wholly immersed while reading. i fell in love with this book and will definitely keep an eye out for anything else m. j. kuhn writes! 4.5 stars!

Thanks for the opportunity to review, though unfortunately I DNF’d this book around 50 pages in. Sadly, it simply wasn’t grabbing me, and I could keep reading but I think I’d likely still struggle to rate it more than two stars. It all feels very shallow so far - as though having the characters constantly swear and multiple references to piss and rats is enough to make a book gritty and edgy. I’m also not getting much sense of any deeper themes that might make this book worth persisting with.

Morally gray characters, humor, magic, and an intense heist is what you’ll find when you read this book! I love a good band of misfits and a magic system that is simple to understand. This book is fast paced and keeps you on your toes! I thoroughly enjoyed this read!

Group work is hard. It’s harder when it’s among thieves (yes, pun intended…heh) who follow the rules of the Lottery; you work as a team until you don’t, and then it’s every person for themselves. In M.J. Kuhn’s debut Among Thieves (2021), select members of the Saints form a crew to steal an artifact from the most powerful man in the world, the Guildmaster. Even as they formulate a plan together, each is also preparing to double-cross one another.

From the blurb, I expected the book to focus solely on Ryia. While the book does start her, I was surprised to find the chapters alternate between members of the heist. I was disappointed because this meant pages are taken away from learning more about the character who initially drew me to the book. Eventually, we learn more about the mysterious Butcher of Carrowick, but it takes a lot longer to get there. The alternating points of view do bring with it some advantages because the other thieves are nearly as interesting as Ryia, carrying secrets of their own and ready to betray one another at any moment. Unfortunately, there were also multiple times when I forgot whose chapter I was reading.

It took a while to get into the book mostly because it took a while to figure out what was going on. I didn’t have patience with the story spread out among so many characters. It wasn’t until about halfway when the book picked up that I was truly invested. This was when I couldn’t put it down. This is when I knew my patience and perseverance were finally going to pay off. By the end of the book, it did!

While Ryia and her story may have been the initial draw, the ending has made it worthwhile to stick around to witness the outcome for each character. I look forward to the next book and to delving deeper into what I hope will be the tie that may bind our team of criminals together.

Unfortunately, I realized fairly early on that I was just not the right audience for this book. I do love fantasy (and was a huge LOTR/Tolkien fan when I was younger), but it seems that nowadays I’m more into “urban fantasy” or “magical realism”, whatever the right label is for magical stuff happening in our own world, rather than completely invented worlds.

I really tried, but I wound up DNF’g Among Thieves after about 25% of the ebook (or about 90 pages in a print book). The characters and the world were confusing and just didn’t draw me in. I didn’t care about what was happening. “Too many books, too little time.” I felt bad about this, as I was reading an advance readers copy. I almost never DNF those.

Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery Books / Saga Press for the opportunity to read an advance readers copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

If you're a fan of Sarah J. Maas you'll definitely love this book. It certainly doesn't read like a debut and is full of twists, turns, and secrets and some excellent world building. I'm looking forward to her next one!

3.5 Stars, not quite 4 for me.
AMONG THIEVES was actually a lot of fun. While I received it as an ARC, I ultimately listened to this one as an audiobook while reading the ARC as well at times, and that will shape my review a lot. I liked the narrator and the vast range of character POVs. It has a very adult SOC quality to it but it stands out as its own book due to the banter between the characters, unique magic, and impressive world-building. It was a lot of fun watching Ryia, Evelyn, Nash, Tristan and Ivan as they race to get a mythical quill before their enemies grab a hold of it, each albeit with their own motivations and secrets that they are hiding. In particular, the banter between Evelyn and Ryia had me almost laughing out loud, so that is a testament. Everything that could go wrong does go wrong for the gang, and the plot moves fast enough that it never dragged at any point. It's a really fun and not too difficult read that has morally grey characters, secret royals, secret identities, HEISTS, gangs and so much more to it. Kuhn's writing as witty and sharp and held my attention with ease. The reason I didn't boost this rating up one star was because, while I thought that the narrator was great and the multiple POVs helped the book itself, it made it easy to lose track of the overarching plot points which made me mentally had to catch up at times as I listened, which would probably not have been as big of an issue if I had read it in book form.

I found myself continuing to read this just to finish it, not because I was absorbing or enjoying the story at all. Apologies to the author, but that's just not how I want to be spending my time right now so I'm going to DNF for now.

So far (48% in) this is a generic fantasy with a gang of miscreants and a McGuffin to heist. I'm sure there's some more interesting elements, but I'm just not connecting to it right now.

Thanks to Netgalley for an arc in exchange for an honest review!

Okay yeah I was not a fan of this. I'm going to make this short because this book took up too much of my time and I don't want to spend more on it. The names, worldbuilding and the fantasy terms felt pretentious and annoying, like the author was a teenager who just discovered how to write original stories on wattpad. Dialogue between the characters were clunky and awkward, and I couldn't relate or root for anyone. I definitely think the writing could improve, and maybe I would've taken it more seriously if the names felt more like they belonged in the fantasy genre instead of in a sorority/frat. Seriously? Callum? Wyatt? Tristan? What's next, Kyle? Everyon was so edgy and very...non-authentic that I found myself cringing throughout the novel.

Ryia Cautella has been on the run for the past 6 years from the Guildmaster who controls the rulers of the 5 Kingdoms by controlling their access to the Adapts he sells them. While in Carrowick, she learns of the device the Guildmaster uses to enforce his control. She persuades a local crime boss to try to obtain the device that a particular ruler desires. She wants to destroy the device, others on the team of miscreants, thieves, smugglers, and disgraced nobles all have their own reasons for laying hands on the device so the scheme quickly unravels into a free-for-all that only seems to produce the desired result. It will be interesting to see if M. J. Kuhn provides further adventures in this grimy, gritty fantasy world.

I loved this book from page one. It gives off a lot of "Six of Crows" meets "Throne of Glass" vibes which was right up my alley.

The book changes perspective between the different characters involved which kept things new and changing throughout the story.

If you are looking for your next fantasy read, I think it should really be this. I had a great time reading this story and I hope there will be more to come from this author!

I feel like this book definitely had the potential to be very good but sadly the execution, for me personally, just didn’t do the idea of it justice.

It was very hard to connect to the characters and while i did like them, i found myself lacking in interest when it came to them. The book followed multiple characters and though i’m not a biggest fan of that, i decided to give it a chance but it just didn’t meet my expectations.

It’s marketed as a book fans of Six of Crows would enjoy and while i definitely see that to be true in some aspects (heist, similar world aesthetics, morally grey characters), i feel this book just lacked in getting me hooked with the characters and the world itself.

I think if i hadn’t gone in with my expectations so high i would’ve enjoyed it more.

Among Thieves by M.J. Kuhn has been making a splash on booktok, so I was curious to see what all the fuss was about. Ever since I read The Lies of Locke Lamora many years ago, I have been a big fan of fantasy heist novels. However, I have sometimes found that I do not agree with popular sentiment surrounding the genre. For example, I was not a huge fan of Six of Crows, which is a top pick for many in the fantasy heist space. Please keep that in mind as I share my mixed feelings about Among Thieves.

The plot of Among Thieves is your typical fantasy heist fare with some original Kuhn twists that differentiate it. Our protagonist is Ryia, a thief with a mysterious past who finds herself in a situation where she needs to steal a McGuffin from a powerful man. She teams up with a group of lowlife individuals who all have their own agendas, and they all must navigate their personal goals with their growing attachment for the squad. Where the originality comes in is in the protagonist, the setting, the prose, and the heist itself.

The characters of this story are a very mixed bag. Ryia is fabulous, and I greatly enjoyed her voice in the story. She is a loud bruiser who uses magic to fight with reinforced hatchets. She eschews the traditional stealthy and shadowy thief archetype as well as the charismatic and charming thief type. Her wit is charming and she has a nice complexity plus a compelling backstory with a solid balance of mystery and intrigue to keep the reader bought in. In addition, Cal, the leader of this crew of rogues, was an excellent support character with mysterious allegiances. He added a wonderful tension to the book, providing a great foil to the other characters. But with the rest of the cast, we encounter some issues.

Ryia, technically, isn’t the only protagonist in the story. The POV is split between Ryia and three other members of the crew who all get a lot of page space. The problem? These three other protagonists are so incredibly bland that I literally cannot even remember what their names are, and I was constantly confused about which was which while reading. I don’t want to belabor this point, as I did like a lot of things about Among Thieves, but I am extremely thankful that Ryia gets the most time as the central voice because I honestly couldn’t care less about the rest of the crew. You might feel differently, but it was a major issue for me throughout the story.

Onto more great things. The world and magic are interesting. The setting is a series of island guilds all run by a grandmaster from the center of the web of islands. The grandmaster controls a series of mutants with powers that range from extrasensory perception, super strengths, and telekinesis. By selling these mutants to the various guilds, but keeping the strongest individuals for their personal army, they keep a tight leash on all the islands. Even if they get past all the henchmen, the grandmaster themselves is imbued with all three sets of abilities, making them a powerful and dangerous antagonist that commands the setting. I also liked Kuhn’s creative usage of a small handful of powers. It made the world feel lived in and functional in a very warm and homey way. The other great thing about Kuhn’s writing is her quick and energetic prose. The action feels kinetic and exciting, the pacing is fast and compelling, and the style is very conducive to a thief’s story. This style allows Kuhn to hoodwink the reader in their distracted state, giving her space play an intricate shell game with clever clues and red herring without the shells. The book is definitely fun, which is a very important characteristic in this style of novel.

All in all, Among Thieves is an entertaining book and a nice break from some of the heavier content I have read this year. My major gripe is that I wish it was a little more memorable and that Ryia didn’t have to do so much of the heavy character lifting. With a more robust cast of voices, I would have devoured this book much more eagerly, but it still was an enjoyable read. If you like heist novels, you can certainly do worse.

Rating: Among Thieves – 7.0/10
-Andrew

Fast paced and fun this read was marketed adult but definitely works for YA as well. Great dynamic between characters, magic, betrayal, great world building!

Meh, I wish there was a bit more worldbuilding and character development. The concept was there, especially with the magic but I just could not connect with the story/characters.

I think fans of Six of Crows may like this though and it is a book that can be enjoyed by both adult and young adult readers alike. It is also being sold as a standalone with the potential for more books. The story did not leave off on any sort of cliffhanger so if you're looking for a rare standalone fantasy with a heist plotline and queer rep (one of the main characters is lesbian), give it a shot!

Among Thieves. The characters, the plots, the adventure. Someone please tell me this is going to be a series because this debut book by M.J. Kuhn was epic!
It was impossible to put down all this gritty, craziness. Told from multiple POVs, I was completely sucked in from the beginning. So many twists and turns that had me laughing with how much fun it was. And that crazy ending, so did not see that coming! There’s plenty of hints that there could be another book and I for one am crossing fingers there will be. Fun times to be had with this book and I highly recommend it.


Stars: 5
I received this book from NetGalley. I was not compensated for the book other than the entertainment it provided. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

A fun fantasy read. With cheats, smugglers, and murders. A life lived in the quarter is hard. You must fight to survive. Governing the streets is Cal Clem. He has the hardest badasses working for him and they will do anything to survive. But will they survive the latest heist? Will they all learn to work together or will it be everyone for themselves? Who will team up with who? Great solid fun read!

Among Thieves is the debut novel by M. J. Kuhn, and it’s a book that promises & delivers on some of my very favorite things about dark fantasy:
•A ragtag group of rogues & thieves? Check
•A grimy, dangerous, seaside city? Check
•Some scenes on a boat? Check
•A badass assassin scaling walls & then slipping away into the night? Check, and mate.
Backstabbing, betrayal, dark magic, atmosphere for days, snarky humor, and just tons of hatchet-related shenanigans. Oh, and it’s casually queer too!
Full review to come on YouTube.