Heist Society (Heist Society #1) – Ally Carter

Title: Heist Society (Heist Society #1) by Ally Carter
Publishing Info: February 9, 2010 by Disney Hyperion
Source: Library
Genres: Contemporary, Young Adult
Find it on the web: Buy from Amazon // GoodreadsDate Completed: September 8, 2012
Related Posts: Uncommon Criminals (Heist Society #2), All Fall Down (Embassy Row #1)

    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.

Total thumbs up for HEIST SOCIETY! I think the best way to put it is a teenage Ocean’s 11 (which is still one of my favorite movies). I love a little bit of espionage and for some reason any story with thieves always has a lot of snark and some cocky sarcasm, which I happen to adore. All thieves need to be a little bit cocky or else they wouldn’t have the confidence to do their jobs!

I guess all heist teams have the same general players in one way or another… Let’s say Kat’s the Danny Ocean, Hale is Rusty, Simon’s our Livingston, and the Bagshaw brothers are the Malloy twins. Gabrielle I guess is more of the Tess in the story except she’s actually involved in the heist as the beauty and some brains.

I loved the character interaction and the semi-unsure relationship between Kat and Hale. They’ve known each other a very long time and now that they’re teenagers it’s like the romantic inklings are just starting to bubble to the surface. It seems like a great best friend turned boyfriend story (or the potential for it) and I can’t wait to see how that develops! I definitely look forward to more heists and more shenanigans as the series continues.

AUDIOBOOK IMPRESSIONS

I picked this one up as an audiobook and so much more enjoyable than the last audiobook I picked up! The narrator, Angela Dawe, was great! Her narrator’s voice was different than Kat’s voice (since the book was in the third person, I really liked that) and she had not the greatest accents, but decent enough! Every character had a distinct voice and it was so easy to listen to. I’d definitely recommend it on audio if you’re interested!

Kat: Kat was an excellent main character.  As opposed to a lot of YA books that usually feature 17 or 18-year-olds, I like that we meet Kat at only 15. You can see she’s already extremely mature (I’m sure she had to grow up fast with a father as a thief and con man) but there’s so much more room to see her grown and develop some romances (hopefully a good one with Hale) since she’s only 15. I thought she was really easy to relate to and developed really was as our main character.
Hale: Loved Hale! He seemed a little cold in the very beginning (for me as a reader, not to Kat), but as the book warms up, so does Hale. I loved his quiet confidence and how you can tell his feelings for Kat are just slowly seeping out and making for a nice slow burn teenage romance.
Gabrielle: I was actually pleasantly surprised at how much I ended up liking Gabrielle! She and Kat start out not the best of friends and working together brings them together again. I really look forward to seeing their friendship grow in later books! I really hope it does.

QUOTES

“She’d absolutely adored the library – an entire building where anyone could take things they didn’t own and feel no remorse about it.”

“It was so rare to find someone who was both so young and so wise, both so fresh and so jaded.”

BUY IT!

This book was SO much fun! I’m really looking forward to reading the rest of the series!

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