THE THIEF LORD, by Cornelia Funke, The Chicken House/Scholastic, 349 pages, $16.95. Winner of the Mildred L. Batchelder Award.
After running away from an intolerable aunt and uncle, two orphan boys, Prosper and Bo, hide in Venice, Italy, a city their mother had often talked about.
Amid the beauty of winged-lion statues, cathedrals and canals, the boys team up with three other homeless children led by the charismatic and secretive Thief Lord, himself only a 13-year-old boy. Their petty crimes are enough to keep them alive while sheltered in an abandoned movie theater.
The children realize they are being watched, then followed, by a detective hired by the aunt and uncle who want to adopt Bo. The band leads Detective Getz through secretive alleys and crumbling buildings, then capture him. His resistance is minimal, and he actually becomes an ally helping to hide the children.
This is only the tip-of-the-iceberg plot. There are secrets hidden in orphanages, pawnshops and calles (alleys). Mystery surrounds grand palaces, an isola segreta (secret island), bridges and cathedrals. There's even a historic, and mystical, merry-go-round that changes a rider's age, depending on which direction it turns. Hanging over all these events is a heavy mist and the incessant rain of Venice. A snowfall, the first in a century, blankets the city, hushing the sounds of vendors and pigeons in the piazza.
Who is this wisp of a boy known as Thief Lord?
What does the pawnshop owner, Barbarossa, harbor in his gloomy, dirty place of business?
Is Signora Ida Spavento truly a benefactor to the Merciful Sister Orphanage? And what is her relationship with the inept Detective Getz?
The author keeps an intense hold over the reader with a quick-paced plot which twists and turns like a carousel interspersing adventure, humor and magic. The characters are brilliantly drawn, their speech and mannerisms clearly leaving an image not soon forgotten. Aunt Esther Harlieb ("didn't look as if smiling was a favorite activity") is a person well-known to young readers.
Hornet, the only girl of the homeless band, has a long thin braid that "looked like a stinger." And the Thief Lord? With his slender fingers, raven black hair in a ponytail ("I can get into any place I want to"), he has another side, a frightened child held captive by circumstances beyond his young control.
Funke has included a map of Venice with a glossary of Italian words sprinkled through "The Thief Lord" that adds to the intrigue of the text.
Detective Getz says it best: "The world is full of surprises." Those many surprises make "The Thief Lord" one of the best books of the year for young readers.
The Mildred L. Batchelder Award honors an American publisher for a children's book (pre-nursery through eighth grade) considered to be the most outstanding of those books originally published in a foreign language in a foreign county and subsequently published in the United States. This award is given annually by the Association for Library Services to Children, a division of the American Library Association.
"The Thief Lord" was first published in Germany and translated into English by Oliver Latsch in 2001. Translations now appear in more than eight foreign countries. Besides the Batchelder Award, "The Thief Lord" has won several European children's literature awards including the Zurich Children's Book Award (2000) and the Children's Book Award from the Vienna House of Literature (2001)