New York Times bestselling and Alex, Nebula, and Hugo-Award-winning author Seanan McGuire introduces readers to a world of amoral alchemy, shadowy organizations, and impossible cities in this standalone fantasy.
Meet Roger. Skilled with words, languages come easily to him. He instinctively understands how the world works through the power of story.
Meet Dodger, his twin. Numbers are her world, her obsession, her everything. All she understands, she does so through the power of math.
Roger and Dodger aren’t exactly human, though they don’t realise it. They aren’t exactly gods, either. Not entirely. Not yet.
Meet Reed, skilled in the alchemical arts like his progenitor before him. Reed created Dodger and her brother. He’s not their father. Not quite. But he has a plan: to raise the twins to the highest power, to ascend with them and claim their authority as his own.
Having only read McGuire's Wayward Children novellas before this one, I was very pleased with how (IMO) much better this one was. I can understand them aiming for different things, but this one feels like it leverages many of the better parts of that series (supernatural experiences from the perspective of kids, how they deal with their uniqueness growing up, how they deal with social expectations) and adds a very generous dose of great, focused worldbuilding as well as some structural weirdness - I was apprehensive at first about how the structure of the book mirrored the twin's powers, but it ended up adding to the overall value for sure - to great success. Ultimately this is a fun, heartwarming and satisfying supernatural conspiracy/adventure book.
The author has grown immensely. This book is the final of the McGuire reading-spree I have been on for months now. I'm sad it has ended. She's brilliant. Her books are a joy to read. Middlegame is no exeption. How she has improved! This felt like her most complex, her most adult book (under the McGuire imprint). I loved the updated complexity.
What I hated, absolutely hated, was the narrator. I think she's a know actress, but she should stay far away from audiobooks. Dodger and Roger were OK. The villains.... she portrayed them with bizar uneven melodrama voices that were like nails on a blackboard. Hard to listen to.
Middlegame is fervent and beautiful; words feel inadequate but maybe numbers can do. I read this in two days because I wanted to read it forever. A book about time and distance, words and numbers; the culmination of the universe is calling and you should answer.
Finishing this book feels like waking up from a dream, I read it in sections, and loved every minute of it but now I'm struggling to say all the wonderful things it led me through. Every time I finished another section I was torn between a desperate desire to know what happened next, and the existential terror of a precious resource dwindling; not wanting this book to ever end. All the characters are complex and vivid; the villains are horrendously dark and terribly evil but also completely understandable, with simple motivations pulling them along twisted paths full of malice, greed, and efficient brutality. Roger …
Middlegame is fervent and beautiful; words feel inadequate but maybe numbers can do. I read this in two days because I wanted to read it forever. A book about time and distance, words and numbers; the culmination of the universe is calling and you should answer.
Finishing this book feels like waking up from a dream, I read it in sections, and loved every minute of it but now I'm struggling to say all the wonderful things it led me through. Every time I finished another section I was torn between a desperate desire to know what happened next, and the existential terror of a precious resource dwindling; not wanting this book to ever end. All the characters are complex and vivid; the villains are horrendously dark and terribly evil but also completely understandable, with simple motivations pulling them along twisted paths full of malice, greed, and efficient brutality. Roger and Dodger (named by people who should never be around children) begin as lonely child geniuses and become so much more.
It's a story of time loops, paradoxes, trying over and over to get everything just right. I love time loop stories, but this one stands out because it's unafraid to let things go. It's surprisingly linear, reserving temporal mischief for where it's most needed, where change will be poignant and weighty. We hear whispers, catch glimpses of how-it-might-have-been-but-is-not. This book is rich with metaphors, practically dripping with them when Roger is involved. Dodger's sections are more brusque, creating a distinct feel when the perspective switches between them. I won't spoil the other perspectives we get, but the narrators have enough presence to affect the tone of their various sections and it works really well (both in each section and coming together to create the narrative).
Book CWs for bullying, parental gaslighting and emotional abuse, murder, major character death, arson, graphic depiction of suicide attempt.
How can a book possibly do so many things? Be so many things? At once Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairytale, every moment bewilderment. But it works, even when I was completely and utterly lost, when the math went so far beyond what I am capable, it all made sense. What a gorgeous, terrifying, incredible book.
I do often enjoy a really weird story (Leech and Viscera are some recent ones), but this one started off with a villain and premise that felt kind of silly instead of fun for me.
