Not what I expected - the plot didn't seem cohesive and was hard to track.

Thankyou for the opportunity to read this book.

I'm not much of a novella reader and I know that there's a lot less time to establish a plot and characters and actually develop them, but this entire novella just felt shallow. There also seems to be no set-up for the world, you're just thrown in, and even as a typical fantasy reader I was a little confused, like you have to assume and figure out so much from context when a lot of it should be in the book.

Besides that the pacing was kind of garbage, like we just skip an entire romance and rush a heist or they make you go into every minutia interaction on the journey, also I love heist scenes in books, kind of hated it here. Also for a supposedly good thief, Zizy sucks at her job and just falls for all these contrived situations. The romance is also super rushed and shoe-horned in. The writing is fine, like it's nothing special, and I didn't have any qualms but also nothing special about it.

This world seems really interesting but I don't think this book had the characters or plot to carry it. The plot was just shallow and despite being really short it was a slog to read through. I'm open and interested in future encounters set in this world though.

I received this book as an arc on NetGalley.

I have been reading quite a few novellas lately, and so I have gotten used to less world building and character development, but I felt like this book was definitely lacking in both areas. While the world was expansive and we got a lot of information about it (usually in info dumps), I felt like there was too much crammed into such a short book. I came away from it feeling like I had been told a lot of things existed, but I knew hardly anything about them and couldn't tell you what was significant. I also was quite disappointed with the characters. There was a lot of potential with our main trio, but with so little background for them. I was confused at their motives a lot, and couldn't get behind some of their actions that seemed out of character for the small bit that I knew about them.

I also really disliked the main character. She was very selfish, impulsive, and made poor decisions. I got the impression she was supposed to be an amazing thief, but that didn't come out at all. And I definitely didn't understand why her aunt thought she was such an asset that would be her perfect assistant. She was not good at anything.

The journey portion was fun, but so much happened that it felt jarring. I wasn't a fan of the pacing. It felt like each mini adventure they had was going to serve a purpose sometime in the future, which is intriguing. However, it was just too much happening that seemed kind of pointless to the main plot of this book. The big final heist we were building up to was actually over very quickly and felt like a let down in my opinion.

Overall, it needed to be a much longer book for how much was introduced. The world is very interesting, and the magic could be very cool with more development, but I couldn't get invested in the plot or the characters.

This was a fun action-packed book. It never took itself too seriously and was an exciting, quick read. I loved the dynamic between Zizy, Laysa, and Pace, and the mini-adventures along the way kept the book interesting from the first to the last page. At times I thought the story jumped around a bit fast, and I got a tiny bit lost on the way, but that's to be expected with a novella. Overall it was a really exciting read perfect when you just want to have fun with a book.

I was given a free copy of Tools of a Thief by D. Hale Rambo (author), Fiercewood Press (publisher), and Netgalley to provide an honest review voluntarily.

Tools of a Thief is first story in the A Series of Decisions of Kairas sequence.

This review will be spoiler free.

I would characterize Tools of a Thief to be sword and sorcery.

The world building in this story is quite extensive for such a short story with providing information about the different types of races such as gnomes, humans, and celestials. The story spends a fair bit of time establishing the different types of deities and religions, different types of professions, and the cities and towns featured in the story.

The magic system featured in this story is interesting, familiar, but still in someways unique. Magic is a significant feature of the story.

The strongest aspect of this story are the characters. Even for a short novel, Ms. Rambo creates a very interesting main character and her two associates. Each of the characters is unique, developed, and engaging even the antagonists.

What tempers my enjoyment in reading Tools of a Thief is the length of the story. The plot of the story is not nearly as developed as I would have preferred. It appears Ms. Rambo is trying to establish the characters, the world-building, and the magic system in this book, and all of this crowds out the story.

I rate Tools of a Thief 3.25 stars.

I would like to thank Ms. Hambo, Fiercewood Press, and Netgalley for the free arc.

This is not a bad story, but I thought the writing was extremely unpolished, and in need for more edits and improvements, for the story to properly shine.

It's clear that the author put a lot of thought in the worldbuilding, from how the world's magic system works, to the various gods, and more, and I definitely would like to know more about the worldbuilding. However, the exposition was awkward and did not integrate well with the story. It was largely awkward info dumps.

Zizy and Laysa's relationship is basically an insta love relationship, and while the two were cute enough to endear them to me, it was frustrating that the relationship's progress was not well written or I think I could enjoy the two even more.

The pacing was all over the place, and I was sometimes confused by the pacing, and where I was in the story. The ending was also rather abrupt, and could have been more clear on exactly what happened. This is basically a novella, with a full fledged novel's plotlines, and I think the author should have either sacrifice some parts of the story for it to be a better written novella, or expand the story for a better written full fledged novel.

Thanks to Netgalley and Fiercewood Press for giving me a copy in exchange for a honest review.

I received this book for an honest review from netgalley #netgalley
#toolsofathief

This book was hard for me to put my finger on or even to write a review. I did enjoy it and I'm glad that I read it I'm not sure if I would read it again but in the moment I am glad that I read it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book in return for an honest review.

This was a well-paced book that needed a bit more fleshing out. I enjoyed it but felt it was lacking in a lot of places - it had the plot of a full novel with half the pages required for a great payoff.

Zizy was an interesting main character, and I enjoyed following the story from her point of view. I felt that Laysa and Pace could have been more fleshed out as we didn’t learn too much about their personalities, but they were likeable companions. The threat of Emba loomed large throughout but I don’t think we felt it with as much pressure as it could’ve been.

I liked that there wasn’t a huge information dump at the beginning, rather the ways of the world and the magic within was dropped evenly throughout, making it feel more authentic.

Overall, this book had a lot of potential, but just fell a bit short of the mark for me.

While its debt to D&D (and similar games) is particularly obvious, this doesn't read like a transcript of a game, and it's definitely not "game-lit".

It involves a gnomish rogue and a couple of people of a race that is, as far as I know, original having a low-level adventure. There's some dungeon delving and a couple of cities, and three main characters with different motivations for traveling.

It's enjoyable enough, but I felt a bit let down by the ending, since the protagonist didn't really resolve her own issue. She failed at most of what she attempted throughout the book, in fact, partly because of her own flaws and partly because the challenges were not that well suited to her skills or skill level. I've read a lot worse, but it didn't quite gel for me.

I received a copy via Netgalley for review.

Tools of a Thief is a fantasy story about a girl named Zizy. I had a problem getting into the story from the get-go. It felt like I was starting a book in the middle. I had a hard time following who the characters were and what was going on. I am sure that readers that are familiar with the author and characters will find it a fun story. Great cover illustration.

I'm very confused about this story. We're just dumped right into the world with very little explanation on what is happening, and then things just go downhill from there. I felt nothing, I mean nothing, from the characters. I really wanted to, but ultimately I did not feel anything from the story and made it about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way through this before I had to put it down and say this wasn't for me. I felt this was more of a first draft than an uncorrected proof.

Wanted to get one short-ish arc done so this was an easy choice to make.

───────────────────

A novella, is traditionally a short piece of writing, therefore trying to cram a full size novel worth of plot lines in it wouldn't really work out that well in my humble opinion.

This book seemingly depends on my own knowledge of the world, the entities in it and the magic system for it to function as well as the author seemingly intended for it to do. Thing is, I feel like I came out of this world with a lot of new terminologies and new ideas without a felt weight behind any of them. Everything feels so incredibly vague and it could easily be attributed to the fact that she tried to include everything in her mind in a single piece of writing.

I have a planned heist, a journey to a completely different task, a clash of ideologies, a study of faith, the morality of access to knowledge and finally I have an inter-species romance that I fail to understand the necessity of when there are clearly more important stuff for a discussion here.

I enjoyed the info-dumps as I'm a person who likes to understand the world of what they're reading about in a way that makes sense for the events on the pages. She provides that a bit in the beginning and at other times, however, there were also some instances in the book where someone seemingly has no idea about something (let me use the sigils conversation as an example) and then once told a very brief description of them, ends up revealing a piece of information that implies they already know a lot more than I was previously led to believe which made it seem inconsistent.

That's not all. Zizy herself is supposed to be an experienced thief and good enough to get out of anything, yet she falls for obvious traps, in constant need of rescuing and is just the type of attack first, ask questions later, that I got the exact opposite image.

I do know that the thing that irked me the most about the book however, was how thinly it was stretched out. The journey aspect took up a huge chunk of it and it was put there just to shoehorn the romance that is as insta-love as it gets which ended up with me not enjoying the journey itself all that much. That left very few pages in comparison for the rest of the intended heist, which was supposedly the main focus of the story to begin with and in turn made the resolution go at breakneck speed just to get wrapped up.

One more annoying thing? It's easily open for a continuation so not planning it accordingly feels like a big missed opportunity when it honestly comes out so so messy despite the author having a lot of ways she can go about exploring the many ideas she wanted to explore here.

Ultimately, I think that D. Hale Rambo has a very clear idea of her world, what she wants to make me see and the rules that make it up. Which makes it a damn shame that the delivery of it all didn't really work in her favour.

I was intruiged by the description of this book but I have to say I was disapointed.
It was way too short for one thing and the pace was breakneck. The characters meet, start travelling and then start kissing? I felt like I missed several chapters on a developing relationship with that one.
This doesn't feel like a complete book. I'm missing description of characters and worldbuilding and a lot of background for the main character. There were some good breadcrumbs and build up for that but then there was nothing?
I'd say the idea is good but there's no depth really.

This book had the potential to be really good, but ultimately left me confused and feeling like I missed a lot. We are dumped right into the story with very little background on the characters or locations. As the story develops there are conversations between characters that do give us some background, but I don't want to be 3/4 of the way through a story before I learn anything about a character's past when it would have been helpful on page 2. Everything would have made more sense with at least a prologue to introduce Zizy and where she comes from before jumping into the story.

Otherwise the story had good action and read at a nice fast pace. It was a quick read I was able to get through in one day. The ending wasn't exactly a cliffhanger but was very abrupt and felt unfinished.

A very short book that was relatively quick to read. As I started to read it, I felt as though I had been dropped into book 2 of a series as there seemed to be so much going on that wasn't explained. This is definitely not a sequel but the scenario lacks background and depth so it causes a great deal of confusion. The characters are not fully developed, they also lack depth. There is very little in the way of plot. Overall a rather disappointing read.

This is my first Netgalley review and the cover caught my eye.
I thought this was a solid read. The exposition was executed well, but the back story and 'telling' a little heavy. Nevertheless I found myself immersed in the world and the characters.

It was a fast read, and while light on characterisation it is the sort of book you can sit and flick through on a commute or just to destress and unwind. Not all novels need to be rich, some are just pure fun - and this was the latter.

A solid 3 stars. I think I'd pick up this author's work again if it was on offer

Thank you to NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book.

Honestly, it wasn’t that this book was HORRIBLE, it’s just that it didn’t really make sense. I feel like we were thrown into a book that doesn’t seem like it should be the FIRST book in a series...

There’s a quest with family drama taking place that we as readers know nothing about, a magic system that is largely unexplained, clearly a large world that consists of places we have no context about (such as their location in proximity or importance), among many other glaringly obvious oversights.

Also, I’m not the biggest fan of insta-love, and it seems especially too fast in this super short story. One minute our two main female characters are meeting in an alley, the next they are talking about spending the night together in a tree... I wasn’t even aware they were FRIENDS at this point, so it seemed a bit rushed and like everything else in this book, unexplained.

The pacing in this book also seems really off for being such a short book-especially that ending. It was SO RUSHED, doesn’t make sense, and ended much too abruptly.

All in all, I appreciate the chance to read this book, but I will not be continuing on with this series.

I was expecting this to be an adventure along the lines of Fighter Fred or Kill the Farm Boy, but the key to those books working well was a strong, funny voice. Without that, you'd need a sturdy and intriguing plot, but Tools of a Thief never tells the reader why Zizi is here or why she's doing things. It felt like I'd missed a first in a series or a lengthy prologue. There were glimpses of goodness, connections at times between the characters, but mostly it fell flat. There's definitely an underlying story trying to get out, but it never fell into place for me. The third part that failed for me was the language. There didn't seem to be much thought given to immersing the reader in the reading experience. Adjectives were dull and vague, settings lacked crispness or interest, and without being given the risks or motivations, I was left holding an empty bag.

Thank you to NetGalley and Fiercewood Press for a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

This was so not what I was expecting and was absolutely so much FUN!!!! After I read it, I looked at the author's bio and was not at all surprised to see that she plays D&D because that's what this book felt like -- an adventure come to life! I fell in love with Zizy immediately, and was so protective of her throughout the whole book. It's a quick read that fantasy fans will love!

This was... decent? It needed a lot of fleshing out. Honestly, it felt like book two of a series or trilogy. There's a lot of background information that I felt like should have been included but wasn't, especially about Zizy's motivations and what happens with Pace and his sister and how Laysa fares. This novella really should have been stretched out into a full length novel.

That said, the reason I complain about it being too short is because *it was too short*. The writing is good and the story is compelling and I wanted more of it.