Middlegame

This book was all sorts of things to me - confusing, frustrating, engaging, interesting. At the end of it all, I'm not sure I understood 100% what the backstory was supposed to be - I'm not even sure if we're meant to understand. It was such a weird, weird journey. It was enjoyable and fascinating, definitely memorable though I wouldn't say particularly endearing or really giving one the warm fuzzies of a new love. This was like a mish-mash of the Wizard of Oz, X-Men, and Doctor Strange and/or Avengers.

I've only ever read three books in Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series and have enjoyed those well enough. I went into this one expecting a very different vibe from that one given that I had the impression this was meant to be more horror, more outright fantasy. I was a little surprised that the tone, the vibe of this one was very much similar to Wayward Children, especially at the very beginning when our protagonists are young kids. I can McGuire's interest in exploring that theme of childhood development and psychology, the traumas and struggles that children go through and the coping mechanisms that they put into place without even knowing what they're doing, and which may sometimes spill over into adulthood. This is still a huge part of Middlegame and though our protagonists eventually have bigger problems to deal with after they've grown up, they never quite forget or leave behind the events of their childhood.

The writing is engagingly descriptive, as McGuire's writing has always been. There's a lot of vivid imagery around here, especially when there're so much to perceive and tell in this world, like how Roger and Dodger experience their existences in completely different ways and how they intertwine occasionally. I did find that the writing got sometimes a little too dramatic and a bit repetitive, but that might just be a personal preference thing. During certain sequences, McGuire repeated certain phrases over and over again in the same passage or chapter to bring a point across. If done very minimally, I think this could drive a point cross, but I thought this was done a tad bit too much here that it dilutes the importance of each “important” phrase. Details: I got a little tired of reading, “There's so much blood.” everytime we skip back to the Book 7 interludes, and honestly I'm not really sure that the volume of blood was really all that important to the crux of the plot. What I liked much more was a bit of that repetition of, “How many times?” which I found more impactful and more relevant to the whole thing about Dodger and Roger having repeated their lives so many times, but that wasn't dwelled upon as much as “there's so much blood” unfortunately.

On a smaller scale, McGuire also uses that repetition to underline an emotional moment, for e.g. pulling a completely unrelated example off the top of my head and not quoting from the book: “... and she doesn't look back. She doesn't look back.” That's fine, I guess, I'm just not the biggest fan of that and it always sounds a bit too dramatic to me.

The pacing of the book was OK, though I always kept wondering if this could have been any shorter. This is a pretty long read and while the action never quite stops and nothing is really draggy, I feel like a large part of the length has to do with the style of narration and descriptions kinda dragging things out a bit. It's not a major problem, though I feel like it could've been perhaps more compact.

Roger and Dodger are the center of this book's universe in more ways than one. We spend almost all our times with them and watching them grow up, taking only an occasional jaunt to catch up on the book's antagonists. I did really like how fleshed out they were for most of the book, where we really delved into how childhood environment and circumstances can impact the way people, even those who are almost identical in every way, grow up. As the plot develops, they both kinda lose a bit of that human colour a bit when they become more aware of their talents, but I don't think I minded that because I was looking forward to some epic magical showdown. Erin was also a surprisingly complex character - dare I say even the most complex one in the whole lot? Leigh and Reed are fairly one-dimensional but we don't spend a lot of time with them so it's OK.

This is a very minor point but I was also kinda amused and just very slightly annoyed by how this book was meant to be encompass the world, the universe, reality itself - but we're so so centered in the United States. Heck, even when we were supposed to be separating twin babies “as far apart as geographically possible” (a paraphrased quote from the book), here I was expecting them to be somewhere in like Nepal and Canada, maybe. In fact, when Roger first says he's in Cambridge, I thought, huh having them in the USA and UK is kinda uninspired but okay. But no, he's actually in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so apparently “as far apart as geographically possible” simply meant on the opposite coasts of one country. There are other less obvious bits in the story that just felt very, very America-centric. I'm in two minds about this - on one hand, if McGuire didn't feel up to writing a character growing up in a completely different culture from her own experience, it makes sense that she just stuck to what she knew and I'd prefer that to half-baked attempts at trying to stick in, say, a South African upbringing if inadequate research was done. On the other hand, the cosmic scale this plot is supposed to be operating on just falls a little flat if we're just boxed up in a single country.

The ending was fine, although I actually kinda wanted to see a lot more, but I suppose it's not a bad thing if we didn't have some miraculous deus ex machina. Spoilery thoughts: I wanted to see Dodger and Roger really come into their manifestation and start pulling Leigh and Reed apart by math and reality alone, but I suppose it's not unrealistic that, still being human in some way, they couldn't possibly grasp the knowledge of how to use all their powers right from the get-go, even when they realized their potential for it. I liked the addition of Kim and Tim to their weird little family in the end, and I suppose that they'll have more of a role to play in the sequel.