Book 33 - Middlegame is Actually the Perfect Title

Title: Middlegame

Author: Seanan McGuire

Genre: sci-fi? fantasy? wherever you put alchemy

For the first half of this book, I had no idea what the heck was going on. McGuire does such a good job and dropping hints, though, about the future to come that it's near impossible to put the damn thing down, even as every sentence brings more and more question marks. At almost exactly the halfway point, things start to really Happen (yes, with a capital "H") - and therein lies my biggest qualm with McGuire's story.

Love the writing. Love the concept - very Fullmetal Alchemist meets, I dunno, Parent Trap and X-Men? The characters are great too: well-written, interesting, and covering a nice array of diversity in both gender and ethnicity. The proportions of the story, though, are what throw me about this one. For the first half, we follow Roger and Dodger through their fraught childhoods as they meet, disperse, meet, and disperse again. We also see snippets of the baddies in action, and the overall effect is one of utter anticipation, and a setting of the stage for the events in the second half of the book. The second half which, in my opinion, should have been 80% of the story. Sure, the childhood development stuff is interesting enough, but in a movie all that would have been a montage in the first few minutes. I wanted to know more about the alchemy side of the things, more about this whole hidden world where there are people, both natural and constructed, trying to find a way to another hidden world. All the work McGuire clearly put into building the whole alchemic structure is largely still hidden by the time the last words are read.

All the disappointments aside, this book is very cool. I love a good world that looks like ours but has a magic underbelly, and McGuire has built such a world. I just wish she had shared more of that juicy content with us!

Rating: 🍓🍓🍓