Dragons, Heists and Other Retirement Plans by Meg PennersonMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I went into this with high expectations - I love heists, generally enjoy dragons, and am reaching a stage of life where retirement plans are also of interest - but I was prepared to be disappointed, and unfortunately I was, somewhat. It isn't bad, but I felt it was lacking in a couple of ways.
A common complaint made against cozy fantasy is that it's boring. Now, I usually don't find it so - stakes don't have to be high and things don't have to be happening every second for me to enjoy a book. Actually, plenty happens (in a plot sense) in this one, but I never felt much of a sense of urgency or tension or suspense or even importance of the stakes until near the end. It meandered from one thing to the next, without the protagonists ever seeming to be in much danger or even to be strongly motivated. I'm not sure why this was; all of the elements were there. There was even a ticking clock after a while, something that had to be done within four days, but it still didn't feel as urgent as it should have. Perhaps it's something in the way the author conveys, or doesn't convey, the inner lives of the characters. The characters themselves, even though they had backstories and interests that should have made them more than just their archetype plus their plot role, still didn't feel to me like they had much depth, and it was probably for the same reason. I seldom got a sense of them feeling anything strongly, even when that's what was being described in narrative; it felt like I was being told it but not shown it.
Even when another, shorter ticking clock was introduced, I didn't find it plausible - it was one of those cinematic cliches where there's a very specific deadline after an exact amount of time for a phenomenon that will harm multiple people, even though if you think about it even for a second, the phenomenon concerned is something that will affect different people differently, and will affect all of them gradually. It's not a binary state of "after this exact second, everything will be irretrievably bad, but before that exact second, if we stop the phenomenon everyone will be perfectly fine almost immediately," but that's how it's represented.
But the book did have some original aspects, and wasn't just a rehearsal of standard tropes (despite occasionally making use of one). The protagonists are close female friends who, forty years before, at which time they were in their 30s, were a famous duo of criminals. That's where the heist comes in, though part of my disappointment was that we didn't really get to see the heist. We saw the heist fail, in a flashback right at the beginning, and we were told later on about how intricate it had been to set up, but that was it.
Largely because the heist failed - through the cheeky and crude intervention of another thief - the pair retired, one to keep magical cats and the other to get married to a solid, decent man and raise a son. She's now widowed. The story is about them coming out of retirement to clean up the continuing mess that their failure 40 years before led to, in the course of which they re-encounter their old rival and discover that he was a dupe of an unscrupulous businessman, and is now a rather pathetic old man.
I did appreciate the avoidance of one common trope. (view spoiler) Other people probably won't like it for much the same reasons that I do.
I also enjoyed the fact that the cats (and dragons) can talk to each other, but their humans don't understand them, even though they understand the humans. It provides a second set of viewpoints in the scenes, and most of the humour.
There's a subplot, which comes up near the beginning and at the end but not in between, about someone who is raising property taxes and driving older people out of their homes when they can't pay. (The word "foreclosure" is used, which isn't quite right; that's when you can't pay a mortgage. When you can't pay taxes, that's seizure.) I assume that's setup for the next book, since it isn't fully resolved or even given much attention in this one.
I wasn't engaged enough, though, to definitely want to continue with the series. It has potential and originality, but something in the style didn't quite connect for me. I increasingly make the distinction these days between sound craft and human appeal. The best books have both; a lot of books I read have human appeal, or, put another way, an engaging story, but fail to back it up with sound craft. This one has decent craft and some good ideas, but as a story it didn't reach me.
I received a copy via Netgalley for review, which may not be exactly the final version.
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