hardcover, 528 pages
Published May 7, 2019 by Tor.com.
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.
Godhood is attainable. Pray it isn’t attained.
This is McGuire at her best. It's difficult write about without spoilers, so I'll just say she's writing at the top of her game - and this continues in the sequel.
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.
Once I understood the chronology and what was going on, I enjoyed the story (though I still had to jump back and forth a bit to fill in some gaps). The dynamic between the characters evolve in ways that use some of my favorite tropes. The book would have been five stars if it were easier to get my initial foothold into the plot.
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.
But the book is wonderful!
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 …
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 did really like it, and I think it had a lot of things I like - intriguing setting, memorable characters, good writing. I did find it a bit long, but I have no idea if it's because I'm in a bit of a hurry (I really want to read another Hugo nominee before I vote) or whether it would have been my opinion as well in other circumstances.
But this was definitely worth the read :)
So this book has weird time travel, creepy twin powers, Oz parallels, and is written like a free verse poem in novel form.
This books grabs on early and doesn't let you go until it's dragged you through to the end. It's just good.
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.
