Published in 2015, Story Thieves is a middle-grade fantasy novel by James Riley and the first installment in the five-book series of the same name. A New York Times bestseller, the novel is a work of metanarrative fiction that explores what happens when the lines between stories and the real world collapse. The plot follows Owen Conners, a boy bored with his everyday life, who discovers that his classmate Bethany has the ability to physically enter books. After learning that she’s “half-fictional” and is searching for her own missing father within the literary world, Owen convinces her to take him into his favorite fantasy series, Kiel Gnomenfoot, setting off a chain of events that threatens both reality and the integrity of the story.

Riley is also known for his Half Upon a Time trilogy, which similarly plays with the conventions of established narratives and fairy tales. In Story Thieves, this interest in storytelling mechanics is central to the novel’s main themes. The book examines Learning Life Lessons From Fiction, Fandom and the Ethics of Story Ownership, and The Search for an Independent Identity.

This guide refers to the 2015 Aladdin paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death, physical abuse, and emotional abuse.

Plot Summary

Owen Conners, a restless middle-school student, notices his classmate Bethany Sanderson hiding a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory behind her math book during a fractions lesson. Later, in the cafeteria, he catches her reaching into the book and pulling out actual chocolate. When she storms off, Owen follows her but only finds the book abandoned in the hallway. He returns the book to the public library, where his mother works and he helps out after school. As he reshelves it, five chocolate-covered fingers push out of the pages, and Bethany pulls herself from the book. When Owen confronts her, she grabs him and yanks him into The War of the Worlds, landing them in a Martian invasion. She insists that the story is already written and can’t be changed and then demonstrates further by jumping them into Through the Looking Glass. When she shows Owen how her body transforms into printed words as she pushes her arm into a page, he faints.

The next day, Owen corners Bethany and learns her secret. Her father is a fictional character who escaped his book and married her mother in the real world. Because she’s “half-fictional,” Bethany has the ability to enter books, and at her fourth birthday party, she accidentally pulled herself, the other children, and her father into a book. She got the children out, but her father was left behind and has since vanished entirely.

Bethany’s mother forbade her from entering books again, but Bethany secretly does so anyway to search for her father. Owen proposes a deal: He wants her to take him into Kiel Gnomenfoot and the End of Everything, the sixth book in his favorite fantasy-adventure series, where a location spell in the spell book of the Magister, Kiel’s wise teacher, could help find her father. Bethany initially refuses but, after seeing her mother crying over memories of her missing husband, ultimately agrees.

Owen’s true motive isn’t the spell. Book six of the series ended with Dr. Verity pointing a ray gun at the Magister, and book seven is due to be released soon. He plans to save the Magister from being killed by Dr. Verity, and he knows that Bethany would never agree to change the story. In Owen’s bedroom, before they go, Bethany lays out strict rules: Do not talk to characters, and do not change the story. As she enters the book, Owen secretly grabs a metal baseball bat and follows her in.

They arrive in the Magister’s tower while the wizard is alone and Kiel Gnomenfoot, his teenage apprentice, is away. Bethany learns the location spell from the Magister’s enchanted spell book. When Dr. Verity breaks in and aims his ray gun at the Magister, Owen strikes the villain with the bat, exploiting a weakness in Verity’s force field that he knows from the books. He shouts triumphantly to the “readers” that he has saved the Magister. Bethany is horrified.

The consequences are swift. The Magister confronts the intruders and exiles Dr. Verity from reality. When Owen accidentally mentions “a book,” the Magister grows suspicious. Bethany tackles Owen and jumps them out of the book, but the Magister has secretly siphoned some of Bethany’s book-jumping power. He opens a portal into Owen’s room, pulls Owen back, and places him under a truth spell.

Owen reveals everything: Their world is fictional, created by an author named Jonathan Porterhouse, and Bethany is half-fictional. The Magister uses the power he siphoned from Bethany to jump him and Kiel into the real world, while Owen is banished to a featureless void outside time and space.

At Porterhouse’s mansion in the real world, the Magister confronts the author, desperate to learn whether Porterhouse invented his world or merely observes it. If the author’s imagination controls everything, the Magister’s entire life has been a fabrication. After a tense standoff, Bethany and Kiel escape using a decoy book and a teleportation spell, landing in a nearby alley in town.

In the void, a faceless being called Nobody rescues Owen. Recognizing Owen’s discomfort with his appearance, Nobody takes on the appearance of a man with bronze-colored hair. He explains that Kiel and the Magister are missing from their book just as the final story is about to begin, and he disguises Owen as a perfect copy of Kiel so that Owen can stand in.

Owen begins the seventh book alongside Charm Mentum, Kiel’s half-robot best friend, whose mechanical parts replaced limbs she lost in an attack engineered by Dr. Verity that killed her parents and sister. He’s immediately immersed in the conflict between the story’s two worlds, the science-based Quanterium and the magic-centered Magisteria. Charm is looking for the Seventh Key, the culmination of her and Kiel’s quests throughout the series to gather the seven keys that will open the Vault of Containment in Quanterium, where the Source of Magic is being held, in order to save Magisteria. She and Kiel have gathered the previous six keys, and she and Owen head to Quanterium to find the seventh and open the vault.

Owen’s unfamiliarity with Kiel’s world nearly gets them killed repeatedly as they battle Science Soldiers and navigate the Nalwork, Quanterium’s internal computer network. Owen eventually discovers a devastating truth: The Seventh Key to the Vault of Containment can only be created by removing the heart of a truly selfless person, killing them. Owen’s knowledge of the small details and foreshadowing of the series force him to realize that this person might be Kiel. Owen must decide whether to flee or sacrifice himself for the people in the story’s world.

In the real world, the Magister uses more of Bethany’s stolen power to raise his magic tower on Porterhouse’s property. He has decided that the people of the real world have no right to control those in the books simply for entertainment; he’s going to free them and release them all into the real world. He collects Porterhouse’s books and begins releasing fictional creatures.

Kiel exhausts his magic by hiding the magic tower from townspeople and erasing their memories. The Magister captures both Bethany and Kiel, strips Kiel of his powers, and traps Bethany inside a fabricated alternate story of her life, written by Porterhouse under duress, in which her father never disappeared. Although Bethany is happy to see her father again, a mysterious voice identifying itself as “nobody important” urges Bethany to wake up. She desperately wants to stay in the life with her father but recognizes that it’s not real and breaks free.

When Bethany awakes from the vision, she and Kiel are in Magister’s dungeon. Kiel picks the locks, drawing on pre-magical street-thief skills, and he and Bethany escape. He urges Bethany to “[b]e more fictional” (287). Bethany discovers an advance copy of the final book of the series, Kiel Gnomenfoot and the Source of Magic, and learns that Owen is in the book and has been living out Kiel’s story, which ends with Kiel’s death.

She uses the one-time location spell she had saved for finding her father to locate Porterhouse, whom the Magister trapped in a Stephen King novel. Bethany taunts the Magister into chasing her through a series of fictional worlds and traps him inside a page from Porterhouse’s old school math textbook about multiplying fractions, a world where magic can’t function.

With Porterhouse rescued, Bethany enters the Kiel Gnomenfoot book and switches the real Kiel back into his story, pulling Owen out. He reveals that he has already sacrificed his heart to Dr. Verity, but because he didn’t do so selflessly, Verity won’t be able to use it to open the vault.

Bethany retrieves the dying First Magician, the ancient creator of the magic keys, and brings him forward in time to provide his own heart for the Seventh Key. Kiel opens the Vault of Containment, which holds the Source of Magic, revealed to be a pile of books. The books reveal that the first magic users were scientists whose experimental records became the foundation of all spells. When Dr. Verity threatens to blow up the world with a bomb, Kiel shoves him and the device into the vault and seals it. Using the Source books, Kiel orders Verity’s entire robot army to stand down.

Given an advance copy of the seventh Kiel Gnomenfoot book, Owen and Bethany read the book’s epilogue together: Five years later, Charm leads the unification of the science-based world of Quanterium and the magic-based world of Magisteria. Bethany tells Owen that in the original story, both the Magister and Kiel died permanently; their interference saved both characters. Owen declines Bethany’s invitation to keep searching for her father with her, saying the experience was too dangerous.

A week later, however, Bethany passes him a note inviting him to visit Narnia, and he can’t say no. Just then, the principal, Mr. Wilcox, introduces a new student named “Kyle” to the class: When he walks in, Owen is shocked to recognize Kiel, brought into the real world by Bethany. As Mr. Wilcox leaves, Owen notices the principal’s face briefly go blank and featureless, resembling Nobody. The principal gives Owen a knowing look and shakes his head as if to say, “Not just yet” (382). Owen suspects that Nobody may be Bethany’s father but decides not to tell her, wanting to avoid raising false hopes.