Heist Society , by Ally Carter

Hardcover, 287 pages

Published February 9th 2010 by Hyperion

ISBN

1423116399 (ISBN13: 9781423116394)

edition language

English

original title

Heist Society

series

Heist Society #1

characters

Gabrielle, Simon, Katarina Bishop, W.W. Hale the Fifth, Arturo Taccone

setting

New York City, New York (United States)
Las Vegas, Nevada (United States)
Sabina Valley (Italy)
...more

literary awards

Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Young Adult Fiction (2010), ALA Teens' Top Ten (2010)

 

When Katarina Bishop was three, her parents took her on a trip to the Louvre…to case it. For her seventh birthday, Katarina and her Uncle Eddie traveled to Austria…to steal the crown jewels. When Kat turned fifteen, she planned a con of her own—scamming her way into the best boarding school in the country, determined to leave the family business behind. Unfortunately, leaving “the life” for a normal life proves harder than she’d expected.

Soon, Kat's friend and former co-conspirator, Hale, appears out of nowhere to bring Kat back into the world she tried so hard to escape. But he has a good reason: a powerful mobster has been robbed of his priceless art collection and wants to retrieve it. Only a master thief could have pulled this job, and Kat's father isn't just on the suspect list, he is the list. Caught between Interpol and a far more deadly enemy, Kat’s dad needs her help.

For Kat, there is only one solution: track down the paintings and steal them back. So what if it's a spectacularly impossible job? She's got two weeks, a teenage crew, and hopefully just enough talent to pull off the biggest heist in her family's history--and, with any luck, steal her life back along the way

 

 My Review

Ally Carter is one of my top five favorite authors. She writes with this huge sense of passion within her words and her books that shows she takes great care to make it the fullest story that she can to keep her readers full attention and affection. In the last series we read about young female spies, in this novel we read about a young female thief, or heist in this case, and all her families.I have noticed that with Ally Carter she does like to make the females of the novel the more popular and prominant characters which is a nice change but it also represented her writing style and the sort of writer that she is which is always good when you intend to write more than one series of books. This for me was very different and almost seemed to be a little taboo in some ways for theiving and stealing are just things that are considered unnorm, and not right. But seeing the adventure that the characters go through are thought provoking and well done as they were within her first series.

Kat is the sort of girl that makes you think back to the gallahger girls series because she seems to have an independant personality where she wants to go out and do all the things that she wants to do rather than follow the rules and the ways of the family. But instead of trying to escape a school or an education system, she actually wants to go to school and become a normal teenager. So when her cousin breaks her out from the school by framing her for something that she did not actually do, you can sort of see why she is slightly shocked and appalled by it all, but not until you read on a little way. Yes this novel is certainly full of different characters, we have Hale the bad boy who is a romantic at heart, Gabrielle who is the posh snob who thinks she is the prettiest one there, Nick who is the outsider and yet who seems to have his own agenda and plans and there are the twins who actually remind me of tweddle dee and tweedle dum. All the characters are well defined and yet they seem like the group of people that you would never ever place together which is probably why it works within the novel and actually makes it exciting and vibrant in its own sort of way.

Kat has basically been pulled out of school because something has occured that has put her dad at risk, someone is accusing her dad of doing something that he did not do and has effectively put a death wish upon his head unless the items gone missing are returned. This automatically makes the piece seem like an adrenaline racing piece because it pulls you in and I think that this is partly due to the fact that the author puts in a sense of personality within the lines in order to make the book as active and as real as she can possible do. We find out things about the thieving world that we perhaps would never have considered, and the very fact that there is even a thieving society out there who plan all these sort of things with the aim to never get caught. There does seem to be a whole lot of agendas here within the novel but its not too confusing unless your not able to decifer the different characters within it.

Perhaps there are just too many characters for one novel in that they all seem to have there main spotlight focus without being consistant throughout the whole entire the book and that of course does actually make it a little overdone, but at the same time it does actually all come together. I am not sure what I entirely feel about this book. it was a case of I didnt entirely love it, but I certainly didnt hate it either, it was almost as if I was just totally unsure of the whole thing and just could not make full sense of it. I will however continue to read the series because I know that it has to be as good as her first series and that its bound to actually pick up a little more as the books go on. as a result of this I am offering the book a three star rating because I think with the final emotions of the book, it ios best to give it the middle rating because of not being entirely sure of it.

   

My rating