While we started writing Heiress Takes All to deliver the sort of epic heist we love to read, we quickly found ourselves drawn into young mastermind Olivia’s story for a different reason: the most sweeping “theft” in this story unfolded outside its pages, long before “Phase One” of Olivia’s plot starts.
Olivia is seventeen and a girl. She lives in the present day. She loves to do her hair and collect jewelry and shoes. For her entire life, she has been made to feel like this makes her unintelligent, inconsequential, her emotions overwrought, her existence frivolous. Like many people just like her, and many people different from her, she has had her dignity and her sense of self-worth stolen from her.
Heiress Takes All is, in her words, what it looks like “when I—when we—steal something back.”
Olivia’s heist is not merely the robbery of money. It is the repossession of an identity. It is the reclamation of the idea of herself as in control, self-possessed, commanding, calculating, someone not to be f—ed with.
Olivia organizes her heist crew from her classmates, young people who have had their capabilities determined for them in easy judgments of their roles and personalities. Her cohort come from a generation called “entitled” while losing their rights and their childhoods to the decisions of people in power.
We write YA literature from a wish to render young people in their unflinching, unforgettable complexity. High-stakes heist plotting pulled us into the creation of Heiress in the company of Olivia’s crew. What kept us there was the story of a mastermind unlike others we’d read, a girl we intended to resonate with every reader who has ever felt misunderstood, mischaracterized, overlooked or pushed aside. You are the mastermind, we say to every Olivia, Deonte, Tom, Cass, Jackson and Kevin reading these pages.
We hope you find Heiress Takes All enjoyable and inspiring in equal measures, and happy heisting
– Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka
