Review: A Swindler's Song

A Swindler's Song by Lindsay Bowen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a mixed bag for me.

On the one hand, I do love a heist. On the other hand, the heist crew weren't as capable or cohesive as I could have wished, and there was a lot of reliance on convenient chance to enable them to pull off the job. I'll put all the lucky breaks in spoiler tags, though some of them come out quite early: (view spoiler)[
- The crew leader physically resembles a famous singer and can sing well, giving them a way to get into the event where they plan to pull the job.
- One of the crew can play the cello, an instrument which the singer is known to have in her backing band.
- The same crew member has grown up exploring a castle which is the exact duplicate of the one they are hitting - there are three of these, on identical islands, with a handwavey story about an ancient matriarch who insisted her three sons build identical castles and cities on the three islands, but it's clearly a plot device to make the heist easier.
- The castle includes an easy back way to the vault that they figure out by being in the right place at the right time, and it's made even easier by the fact that the eldest of the lord's four eerily similar wives has a crush on the crew leader and gives her a key.
- The escape plan relies heavily on timing that there is no way to guarantee, but of course works perfectly.
- Not to even mention the elven superpowers.
(hide spoiler)]

In other words, the author stacks the deck heavily in favour of the characters. They do still have to work for their success, and one of them does so while dealing with a chronic illness, and there's genuine danger from the despotic "warlords" (I would have just called them lords; warlords implies a more improvised situation than the multi-generational rule they represent). But it reduces the characters' agency to see them helped along like this, and character agency is an important part of the heist genre for me.

The romance subplot progresses rapidly from spur-of-the-moment hookup to enemies to fake married to soulmates having outrageously blissful sex (on-page, so if you prefer not to read that, this isn't your book). I wasn't a fan of the speed-run, or really of either of the partners much. The author gave them heartstring-tugging backstories and laudable goals, but somehow I never fully warmed up to them. I also spotted the big "twist" at the end 40% of the way through.

It was far from the worst copy-edited book I've seen lately, though the author's apostrophe game is weak when it comes to plural nouns, and there's the occasional missed opportunity to use the past perfect tense. A number of idioms are not quite rendered correctly (it's subtle), and a few sentences don't say exactly what they mean. I saw a pre-publication version via Netgalley, and there may or may not be more editing to come.

The worldbuilding is the usual not-particularly-coherent mix of standard sword-and-sorcery world with random bits of our world wherever there's a gap to be filled. The names, for example, as is so often the case, are a mix of made-up fantasy names, names out of the Bible (in a setting where such religion as there is is Basic Fantasy Paganism, but with the gods absent because of reasons), and names from specific ethnic backgrounds in our world standing in for countries in a completely different geography. There's been some effort put in - the absence of the gods and (at least theoretically) of magic, though I've seen both of those before - but it's mostly generic.

All in all, I was lukewarm on it, and it wasn't quite for me. I'd not be at all surprised if it was for plenty of other people, though.

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