Heiress Takes All

If you like your heists with a side of ~drama~, this one's for you. We've got messy parental relationships, squabbling extended family, blackmail, and dash of a love triangle to round it all out. Olivia Owens used to live a life of luxury - full of money, and devoid of meaning. This all changes when her mother divorces her cheating father, and she's left hanging in in the void between them. Kicked out of her family home, and with a mother struggling to make end's meet, she decides to get revenge by stealing millions of dollars from her father, all in the middle of his wedding to his third wife. She cobbles together a group of skilled teens (and one out-of-luck teacher) for her crew, puts together a very serviceable plan, and gets to work. The crew members are all fun and well-written with strong personalities and reasons of their own to be in this caper. I always like the actor character, so Tom is my instant fave, but they're all great. So great that Olivia somehow winds up being the one with the least to go on. She describes herself as determined, but all flashbacks portray her as somewhat directionless, with no clear path to how she became who she is. She researches thoroughly, masterminds a plan, and then doesn't include any fallbacks or contingencies for the complications that inevitably arise. Her motivations never fully hit sympathetically relatable, or ruthlessly entertaining, hovering somewhere between the two. She spends a lot of time pretending to be the girl the tabloids expect her to be, and very little being herself. I can't tell who she really is at all. Maybe she can't either. The book ends as a fairly comfortable oneshot. The door's open just enough that a sequel could happen, but the ending is satisfying enough that it doesn't need more.

Thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown Books for Young Readers for an advance copy. All thoughts in this review are my own!