"You're fact-checking my death threat?" "It's not much of a threat if it's physically impossible, now is it?"

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Thank you to Henry Holt and Co. (BYR) and Netgalley for both an e-ARC review copy of this book.

Holy Terrors is the final book in the Little Thieves trilogy, one of my favorite series! After book after book of unfortunate events, and to be as vague as possible, Vanja's plan to live a new life path she set for herself goes awry as she finds herself framed for murder. Can she evade this case or manage to prove her innocence without getting caught up by her old life?

It was lovely to be back in the world of Little Thieves and watch all of the characters reunite in different ways. I grew attached to every side character (to my detriment, of course). The setting and mythology stayed intriguing as well. I couldn't find a list of quotes saved anywhere, but I wonder if they were on my library ebook's highlights. I do remember that this book made me both laugh and cry, though.

The only part I found difficult to get through was just how much of it was spent losing/being tortured in different ways. Each book tackled heavy/serious topics, but this one felt like the turmoil dragged on for significantly longer, to the point that my intrigue to keep reading started to diminish near the end. That's the only part that kept this one from five stars like the other books in the series.

Overall, this was an excellent trilogy that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys a YA fantasy that has hilarious banter, enemies to ???? to ?!?!? to ???!???, and characters that will live on in your brain long past the last page.

Holy Terrors completely blew me away—it’s dark, gripping, and beautifully written, with a story that kept me hooked from start to finish. The world-building felt rich and immersive, and the characters were complex in all the best ways. Between the intense plot, and captivating characters this book earned every one of my five stars.

While it was great to be back with Vanja and Emeric, I ended up enjoying this less than the previous two books. Those were very much favourites for me, and this one simply didn't live up to it. The character dynamics and the humour were once again so entertaining, but I wasn't as into the plot this time. I felt like everything was drawn out unnecessarily, and the longer the book went on, the more confusing everything became.

This will likely be the most upsetting review I will write all year.

As someone who adored books 1 and 2 in this series, having reread them in preparation for this final installment, I am so disappointed that I did not enjoy Holy Terrors as much as I expected. I will say that I hosted a read along event on YouTube with fellow booktuber and friend Margaret @TheWordN3rd, and I am very much in the minority when it comes to my own reactions to this book. So, if you are reading through reviews to see whether it is worth it to finish out the series, please keep that in mind.

My biggest gripe with Holy Terrors is that the actions of Vanya and Emeric in this book particularly made it clear to me that the two should not be endgame. Maybe in other realities, if different choices were made (iykyk), then these two characters could have their happily ever after, but the way this book progressed, I knew very early on that I would have a hard time rooting for them. And that's...the last thing you want when you see an inevitable second chance romance in the works. I also found the plotting to be more scattered and stretched in different directions than I would have liked. There was a moment that the narrative felt like a fantasy-mystery genre blend which I absolutely was on board for, but then the story pivoted in another direction, and I found myself overwhelmed while also being frustrated with characters' decisions.

Ultimately, I would still recommend Little Thieves and Painted Devils to readers, especially as the former could be read as a standalone, but I will also be informing them that the final book disappointed me with the choice in narrative structure and how things wrapped up.

Actual Rating: 3.0 stars
Original Pub Date: 1 Apr 2025
Reading Format: physical book + audiobook

Thank you NetGalley and Henry Holt for an E-ARC copy in exchange for this honest review!

What a great ending for this series! Owens really knows how to bring the heartbreak, and she's one of my favorite YA fantasy authors. Would recommend this series.

Owen masterfully blends horror with intricate world-building and compelling characters, creating a unique and unforgettable reading experience. A must-read for those who enjoy their fantasy with a gothic, unsettling edge.

I'm not gonna lie, I was VERY worried about how this book was going to go after the ending of Painted Devils and the Fallow Year stories, but I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised. I think the characters' developement was handled beautifully, as well as their relationships between each other. I was very VERY!!! concerned about the endgame but thankfully Margaret Owen gave us a good ending for them! I love how even though Vanja never could tell Emeric what had happened he still found out (did I see it coming when she gave the notebook to Kirkling? Yes. But I still loved it.)

For some downsides, I thought the whole alternative timeline/Vanjette stuff was a bit messy, or at least messily explained if that makes sense. I wish she would've taken more time explaining how that worked because I was kind of confused since the first time it was introduced and it didn't get any better during the ending.

Overall I think this is a very good ending for the series and I'm very happy I ever picked it up!! This is not an ARC anymore but I did prioritize these books thanks to NetGalley because I got this one approved (months ago so I bought the book myself at this point) so that was fun!!

In Holy Terrors, the motto "Vanja, yes" is taken to a whole new level. The book is chaotic, humorous, bloody and heart wrenching. It was a very satisfying conclusion to a beloved series.

The Little Thieves series is one of my favorites. Holy Terrors didn't disappoint!

Vanya has been gone two years. She's righting wrongs for the poor, but not exactly legally. When people start killing royalty before a new Emperor can be chosen, Vanya is made to solve the mystery, along with her former lover (and love of her life) Emeric.

This book has more twists and turns than a mountain road. Readers should not attempt this book unless they've read the first two in the series. I wish I had gone back to skim the others before reading Holy Terrors!

If you love old folklore, daring women, and backstabbing royalty, try this series.

Looking for a completed YA fantasy trilogy to love? Holy Terrors is the third book in the Little Thieves series by Margaret Owen.

We once again meet up with Vanja and Emeric as Vanja tries to save her name and Emeric is sent to investigate.

I can’t say too much as the books are connected but there is such great humor in this series and , of course, a love story.

The third book got a bit confusing for me with some time jobs towards the end and Vanja and Emeric’s path to love was not my favorite in this book but overall this is one of my favorite fantasy series I’ve read and you will love it!

This was truly everything I had hoped for in the finale book in this series and more. Truly Margaret Owen is an author I will be following around for series to come.

Incredible. Wow. This was one stupendous book. Margaret Own has a way with words that is unlike any other author out there. Intense emotion, real characters and story telling at its best, Please read this book!

Margaret Owen and The Little Thieves trilogy own so much of me. Holy Terrors is infuriating at times while heartrending at others. More importantly, it is well worth the wait. Just as Owen writes in the dedication, there is much more to Vanja's story.

Owen captivated me with a character who had flaws. What seemed like selfishness made way for more selfishness...until Vanja's layers were unraveled by an annoyingly almost perfect prefect. Indeed, the selfishness was hiding something more complex, more vulnerable. Vanja has experienced an immense amount of growth through the trilogy. This one in particular is Vanja at her most vulnerable and also most(ly) honorable while she is forced to work with Emeric. (Why yes, I did want to smack Emeric in the head a few times. You did too?) It gets twisty but gives an ending I did not expect but ultimately felt oh-so-right. Holy Terrors ties things up better than I hoped. It was the ending I did not realize I needed.

Holy Terrors is a fierce, heartfelt finale packed with sharp wit, high stakes, and emotional punches. I really enjoyed this one.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I pretty much read Little Thieves, Painted Devils and Holy Terrors back to back to back. I love this trilogy and the I was so invested in the characters through each one. Holy Terrors was a little bit of a pain point for me and perhaps it's because I read them so close together, that by this book some plot points felt repetitive and I felt impatient having to read through some of the character conflicts because they felt so continuous. I also felt my attention was not fully invested in the core plot for this third book, most likely all a result of my choice to read all in a row. Margaret Owen's writing is amazing and I loved her world building, the characters I will miss and I'm happy I chose to read this series. 100% would recommend.

Oh how I love this series! Margaret Owen had so much pressure to deliver the ending and she did an amazing job! I loved being back with Vanja and Emeric and seeing how their story played out. In the finale, we get many callbacks to what happened in prior books as well as new characters I grew to love. Junior, I'm looking at you. I felt very satisfied with the ending after everything these characters have been through. It is hard to review this one without spoilers but just know this series is worth your while!

This was a disappointing finale to the series, I really hated the direction the author went with the romance; it ruined the book for me. Emeric treated Vanya so terribly, I hated him. I thought the idea of a “divorce” book could have been cool but unfortunately it spoiled everything I liked about the romance,

You’ve seen it before: The hero drops his voice into its lowest register, so you know he means business. I never want to see you again. The love interest’s eyes fill up with tears. Is this real? Why are you doing this? Beneath his stony façade, he’s heartbroken too, but there’s no help for it. For her own safety, he has to nobly deny his own happiness, and hers, and go off into the night, a lone wolf once more. If not, what of his enemies? Etc.

I have seen this scenario play out, conservatively, one trillion times without anyone asking any follow-up questions like “Doesn’t Doc Ock already know he cares about MJ, though?” or “Why does she think this will solve her problems?” My private trope rule is that the required level of in-universe plausibility for deploying a given trope stands in direct proportion to the plot significance the trope is being asked to bear. If there’s only one bed for a couple of chapters or a single TV episode, I don’t need a ton of groundwork from the writers on that. If the characters are enemies who then become lovers, and that’s the whole arc of the book, then I am going to need some solid basis for their starting enmity, and I will then need it to be resoundingly overcome. Put in the litcrit language of Tumblr nerds, I need the load-bearing tropes to have a rock-solid Watsonian grounding.

The formulation of Watsonian vs Doylist explanations distinguishes between in-universe and extra-textual reasons why certain things happen in a story. The Watsonian explanation draws only on in-universe context: Spider-man has trauma from what happened to Gwen Stacy, so it makes sense that he would try to protect MJ by breaking up with her even though they are in love. (This doesn’t help us explain what Tobey Maguire’s problem is, but I do not have time just now to get into all the various Spider-mans and my feelings about Gwen Stacy.) The Doylist explanation acknowledges the motives and intentions of the writers: If the hero’s relationship is all sunshine and roses in between supervillain attacks, a narrative avenue is foreclosed. If he gets together with his girlfriend once, and then he breaks her heart to save her, that means the writers, and the readers, have the fun of getting them together a second time.

It is fun. I do like it. But I’m damned if I can think of a romance trope that’s gone so thoroughly un-deconstructed.

For whatever reason, authors count so much on readers recognizing and enjoying this trope in SFF romances that they don’t bother coming up with a plausible Watsonian reason for its inclusion. It’s just what happens when a certain brand of SFF protagonist has a romance that stretches over more than one movie/book/season. I want writers to ground this sequence of events in character and relationship, but it’s maddeningly rare for them to actually do it. The audience is asked to take it as read that the heartbreaker is acting in their partner’s best interests, and that the heartbreakee eventually comes to understand this, doesn’t mind too much, and is prepared to move the relationship forward as soon as the heartbreaker stops actively trying to break their heart. Until this literal year, nobody, not once not ever, has bothered putting in the work to convince me that any part of this sequence of events made plot or emotional sense.

This year brought us Margaret Owen’s Holy Terrors. It’s the third in a trilogy about an angry, selfish girl named Vanja who made it through a lifetime of neglect and abuse with a crop of emotional and physical scars, a talent for picking pockets, the favor of the gods (sometimes), and a healthy hostility for rich people. Against both their better judgment, she falls in love with prefect Emeric Conrad, whom she variously describes as a “human civics primer,” an “accounting ledger made flesh,” and an “intolerable filing cabinet.”

(Here the author of this piece has been compelled to delete a ten thousand–word manifesto about the greatness of the Little Thieves series. If you like the TV show Leverage, or you enjoy digging your teeth into solid character development, or you just hate rich people, you should read it. The first book is Little Thieves. Thank me later.)

At the end of the second book, Painted Devils, Vanja leaves Emeric for his own good, on the principle that their enemies will use her against him if they’re together. She’s really cruel about it, to make sure it sticks. She takes off with the Wild Hunt and intends never to see him again. Then you will never guess what happens in Holy Terrors. Yes! She sees him again! Now he’s engaged! And you know what, I talked a big game earlier about my expectations for load-bearing tropes and what the authors owed me, but I have to be honest right now and admit that Margaret Owen had me for cheap. I didn’t need her to unpack one single thing. I love these characters. I had been waiting several years. Emeric shows up engaged, and I’m like, yes, good, great, I accept. Vanja left him for his own good. Now he is engaged to someone else, and they have to stop a magical serial killer together. Daiyenu.

But these books are operating on a different, better level, and a good chunk of Holy Terrors is dedicated to unpacking what Vanja did and why she did it. Margaret Owen does with the trope what you’re supposed to do with tropes: She uses it to tell us more about these two characters and how they relate to each other and what that means for their future. Vanja’s starting point, at the end of Painted Devils, was her certainty that she would always be a weapon someone would use against Emeric. (What of his enemies?) No matter how often he promised her it wouldn’t happen that way, she knew he’d eventually be forced to choose between his life’s work and his relationship with her. So she leaves. She breaks his heart, to save him.

Or… Is that what she does? Is that why she does it?

In a book about the many lives we could have lived, Owen produces a world of possible answers to those questions. The deepest, most painful reason for why Vanja did what she did is that she can’t believe she’s good enough for Emeric. When she thinks about staying with him, she remembers how her mother—who abandoned her when Vanja was four years old—used to say of her, “Whatever she touches falls to ruin.”

Each section of the book begins with a story about a choice Vanja could have made differently, and what her life would have looked like, then. It’s a hint at the story the book is telling. In one version of her life, Vanja goes straight and wonders if that has made her “worthy of a prefect.” In another, she and Emeric stay with each other, but it comes—as Vanja always feared—at the price of Emeric’s professional success. A voice in her head asks her, “How could someone like you ever be anything but a burden?”

At one point in the main narrative, a bruised and angry Emeric tells Vanja coldly that he knows why she left. “You needed to do to me what your mother did to you,” he says. “You needed to understand her, so you repeated her actions. You were trying to find answers by abandoning me.” It’s not the story Vanja’s been telling herself, the story of choosing to give up her happiness to protect the possibility of Emeric’s, but it’s not a million miles off the truth, either. Owen’s been showing us all along that Vanja’s relationship with her mother left behind fault lines that Vanja has had to learn how to live with. When a friend asks her if she still believes what her mother told her, that she could only bring harm to Emeric, Vanja says with all the honesty she can muster, “I’m trying not to, these days.”

This—the recognition that the heartbreaker is operating from a place of internal damage, rather than rational good sense—is already ten thousand times more interesting than any other version of breaking someone’s heart to save them than I’ve ever encountered in my life before. But Margaret Owen’s not done. In one confrontation, Vanja finally manages to articulate what Emeric was contributing to their dynamic. When they were together, before she left him, when she tried to point out problems to him, or voice her uncertainties, he hastened to insist the problems didn’t exist and he had solutions for her uncertainties. Without ever intending to, he made her believe that the only version of her he could love would be one that fit neatly into his life, the life of a prefect. “You saw someone you wanted to see in me,” Vanja tells him. “Not someone I ever could have been.”

So yeah: there was more to it than breaking his heart to save him. She messed up. He messed up. The thing is, though, none of that is the real problem, just the substrate for the real problem. The rupture in Vanja’s relationship with Emeric still matters, is still a thing to be repaired; but the truth she arrives at, ultimately, is that she couldn’t be with Emeric until she grew into a person who could be with Emeric. If this sounds like a tautology, it’s the tautology that underlines the romance genre. The best romances are stories of becoming. Romance protagonists don’t just happen to meet the loves of their lives. They have to become the self that can receive the love that will carry them into their happily ever after. I didn’t realize how much I was craving a proper Watsonian explication of the break-his-heart-to-save-him trope until Margaret Owen came along. She took the trope by the scruff of its neck, put it through its paces, and shook like seventeen different emotional truths out of it. I complained recently about romantasy’s tendency to reproduce tropes without bothering too much about them, and Holy Terrors is the glorious antithesis to that trend. This is tropes done right, the absolute acme of playing with tropes in SFF romance. Margaret Owen’s setting the bar that I’ll now always be asking the genre to meet.

Thanks to Macmillan Publishing and Netgalley for the ARC.

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OMG.........Margaret has left me in tears and why is it over?? I am so, so, so glad a friend told me I needed to read this series because it has been one of the best I've read over the last couple of years. I am not going to get into specifics for spoilery reasons, but honestly how can you even unpack all that is in this story anyway!! This tale definitely went unexpected places to wrap up the wonderful story of Vanya and Emeric, Gisele and Ragna and all the fantastic side characters that inhabit this wonderful world. It's an action-packed whirlwind of murders, conspiracies and finding the path to accepting the love that you are given. Margaret really knows how to hit you in the feels and there are some moments of devastation and definitely moments of redemption. Loved every minute of it. I listened to the audio and as usual Saskia does a marvelous narration. If you have at all considered reading this series but not yet dived in...........what the heck are you waiting for, get to it!!!

Forever grateful i got to read this last installment in the trilogy! 🥰
Vanja and Emeric has a special place in my heart and I loved how they became a somewhat responsible new adults. With chaos and more unhinged plot development of course.
I screamed, cried and laughed my way through the whole book and so glad I pushed through my heartbreak, because the end was chefs kiss!