The Trickster Figure in Queer YA: A Case Study of Margaret Owen’s Little Thieves

The emerging space of queer Young Adult literature is a vibrant storytelling landscape for trickster characters and trickster tales, argues Alex Henderson.

Abstract

As scholars such as Helena Bassil-Morozow have explored, the trickster character type—with its roots in mythology, folklore, and oral storytelling traditions—has been constantly reinvented and remixed in the context of contemporary literature and pop culture. The themes of liminality, marginality, shape-changing, and questioning authority with a playful and rebellious sense of humour, mean that the trickster may be especially at home in work aimed at adolescent readers, particularly those of marginalised identities. The emerging space of queer Young Adult (YA) literature is thus a vibrant storytelling landscape for trickster characters and trickster tales.

This paper explores the queer trickster characteristics of Vanja, the anti-heroine of Margaret Owen’s Little Thieves. Vanja is a young, queer, marginal figure, her character arc concerned with agency and autonomy. She uses shapeshifting magic and clever subterfuge to impersonate nobility and steal from the rich, transgressing the borders of wealth and class, all while offering the reader a critique of the power structures and entitled individuals that support this social divide. Vanja’s liminality, humour, and eventual emergence as an (accidental) folk hero mark her as a queer teenage trickster protagonist and an effective example of the potential in this storytelling space.