Raised by a sorcerer, Odile has spent years preparing for the heist of a lifetime. It’s perfectly simple. Impersonate a princess, infiltrate the palace, steal the king's enchanted crown and restore magic to the kingdom.
But when the King is unexpectedly murdered, she’s forced to recruit the help of Marie d'Odette, the real princess, and the two begin to unravel a web of lies and deceit that leaves Odile uncertain of who to trust. Soon though Odile must decide – her mission or the girl she’s falling for?
"Power comes with a price, but it also comes with promise."
A.B. Poranek's A Treachery of Swans is a sapphic YA retelling of Swan Lake, a fanciful murder mystery with a gothic feel. I would have been obsessed with this as a young girl, but the writing and intended audience is a bit juvenile. Still, it's a compelling journey for an adult reader. Narrated entirely from the point of view of Odile, foil and antagonist from the ballet, this novel gives her some much needed depth and gives a fresh new perspective to Tchaikovsky's story, using bits and pieces from the many versions of the ballet. The author has done their research, and it shows, but the story doesn't match completely the tragic vibes of the ballet.
In a world where golden-blooded people are shunned for their affinity with a magic whose misuse has thrown the kingdom into chaos, Odile does everything her father tells her in order to restore magic and thus find her own place. A witty actress and a vicious thief, Odile once struck a friendship with her mark Marie d'Odette, and it's her now that she has to impersonate to deceive and marry the prince, but she finds herself drawn into a conspiracy where nothing is as it seems at first. Her relationship with Odette, who appears rarely in the first half of the novel, grows from the roots of what they once were for each other, from a moment that still fills Odile with shame. Their slow-burn romance is sweet. In a book where everyone just aches to belong, Odette is her perfect counterpart, warm and kind and wounded, but also made of steel. The character work in this is superb, especially Odile's slow realization of her own worth and her reckoning with an abusive parental figure.
The decision to have a French-inspired court and terms works, lending to the dreamy, soft atmosphere, reading like a court tale from Seventeenth Century France. There's a hint of the Phantom of the Opera, too, in the lake and the masked villain - which also comes from Tchaikovsky, of course, as the imagery of the owl. The fantasy aspects blend well, weaving a tale of revenge, magic, and a journey of self-acceptance. The explosive ending is followed by an abrupt epilogue that is still enough athmospheric to work, but it takes away a bit of the brilliance.
The supporting cast does the work. Odile's father, of course, is a grandiose antagonist, while the Dauphin gets some more depth too, adding to the bare bones of Tchaikovsky's Prince Siegfried. There's also a hint of an achillean relationship, which adds to the tension somewhat, but it's woefully underdeveloped. Odile's brother is a welcome addition.
A Treachery of Swans is the Swan Lake sapphic retelling I've been waiting for two decades.
✨ 4 stars
😈👩🏻 So you want to read a sapphic villain retelling?
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