ARC Review: Middlegame

MIDDLEGAME
SEANAN MCGUIRE
SERIES: Standalone
GENRES/ SUBJECTS: Dark Sci-Fi/ Fantasy

★★★★★

Goodreads // Wordery // Book Depository

For fans of: Frankenstein, Vicious

 

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.

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

 

Will there ever be a Seanan McGuire book I don’t enjoy?

Middlegame is such an ambitious, immersive and packed novel, I was completely sucked into it. However, it’s sort of hard to review without giving too much away!

Middlegame has mad scientists, alchemists, psychic twins, fairytales and timetravel. It’s a sort of dark science-fantasy. The overall feel of the novel is somewhere between the other McGuire books I’ve read (Toby Daye, Wayward Children and Indexing), and her horror writing under Mira Grant (Drowning in the Deep, Feed).

Roger and Dodger are such complex and fascinating characters. Over the course of their lives from childhood to their thirties we see them go through trials and tribulations, being pulled apart and drawn together. Middlegame is a book about dichotomy: math and language, order and chaos, reality and fantasy.

I loved how unapologetically science-y this book it. It’s complicated and keeps up with its genius protagonists. There were a couple of points where I was a little confused, but it didn’t matter at all and I loved the way everything came together.

I was a little worried that, at over 500 pages, I might find Middlegame a little long, but the characters were so compelling and the story so addictive that I was always desperate to get back to it.

A must-read from an author who’s consistently brilliant.

 

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