Book Review: Pretty Things

Pretty Things by Janelle Brown

I wanted something that had a heist plot, and Audible recommended this one, probably because one of the narrators was the same who read Bluff, which I enjoyed so much. The main characters are Nina, an art thief, and Vanessa, an heiress turned instagram star. Nina, who turned to theft when her art history degree wasn’t pulling in enough money to pay for her mother’s expensive cancer treatments, starts out as the far more likeable of the two. She and Laughlin, her partner in crime, only steal pretty things from people who can afford it, people who are so rich they barely know what they’re missing. Vanessa Liebling seems to fit that category. She’s a spoiled heiress who becomes an instagram star when it turns out she’s not really good at much except for spending money in order to get people to pay attention to her.

Nina has learned about Vanessa by following Vanessa’s instagram, but we learn that Nina already knows who Vanessa is. Nina used to live in Tahoe, where Vanessa’s ancestral home is, and the two families are already interconnected. When Nina learns that Vanessa has gone back to Stonehaven, the giant mansion of the Liebling family, she decides that she and Laughlin have found a good mark.

As Nina adopts a persona to infiltrate Vanessa’s life, Vanessa starts to become more and more sympathetic and Nina loses the moral high ground. I did start to feel sorry for Vanessa, start to pity her, but I never much liked her. She remains shallow and self-absorbed, and when we learn how broken and fragile she is, it doesn’t much mitigate the fact that she’s an especally useless woman whose only real skill is getting strangers to pay attention to her.

The plot has plenty of fun twists. It’s a little tedious to see the same scene from Nina’s point of view and then from Vanessa’s point of view, but I can understand why that helped develop their changing relationship to one another. While it’s not really a heist story, it does have some double-crossing and unexpected alliances that gave me pleasant surprises. The ending scene wasn’t well thought out (the main characters had a dumb plan that never would have worked) but I can gloss over that because the surprise reveals leading up to that were so satisfying.





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