Format: Hardcover, 528 pages
Release Date: May 7, 2019
Publisher: Tor.com
Source: Publisher
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy
New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Seanan McGuire introduces readers to a world of amoral alchemy, shadowy organizations, and impossible cities in this standalone fantasy
Master fantasist Seanan McGuire introduces readers to an America run in the shadows by the Alchemical Congress, a powerful society focused on transmuting reality itself.
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 realize 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.
Author Seanan McGuire's Middlegame is a twisted story that follows several key characters including James Reed, Leigh Barrow, Dodger Cheswich, and Rodger Middleton. The story begins in 1886 where a children's author uses fiction to encode her
principals on alchemy with an end goal of ultimate, godly power. Her creation, James Reed, has tried to breed children in pairs using the concepts of Chaos and Disorder - Language and Math - into each subject.
By splitting the Doctrine of Ethos into a pair of human bodies, one of whom is endowed with an extraordinary
deftness for math, and the other an extraordinary dexterity for
language, Reed has exceeded his creator Asphodel. His children are attuned to natural elements like Water, Fire, Earth, and Air. Dodger and Rodger have no idea how special they are until they are able to speak to each other cross country. Dodger and Rodger believe that they are able to communicate long distances because of quantum entanglement.
There is a part of me that was saddened that the book was way too long for what could have been decided in 300 pages or so. It was also puzzling that every time the twins got closer, one of them would do something dumb, and walk away thus pushing the timeline ahead several years into the future. There is a particular story line that I had to go back and re-read several times in order to understand. That is the Impossible City which Reed designs his entire plans on being able to be the first one to reach its destination.
Rodger and Dodger struggle with many different issues in this book. The twins are simultaneously drawn together and repelled from each other. They have issues that tear them apart, but they always seem to find a way back together again even if it takes up to 7 years at one point. The curious part of the story was using dozens of bodies in order to create one single one as to what happens to one of the main characters in this book. It is fair to say that none of the characters in this book were born, they were instead made by those like Reed, and Leigh Barrow who is just plain evil incarnate. Rodger and Dodger become a sort of rallying point since they are the only twins who have survived being separated by long distances.
Finally, it is fair to say that because of who the author is of this book, I had more patience than I would if I didn't know who the author was, or what she was capable of in terms of resolving opened storylines.
intriguing cover. love it
ReplyDeletesherry @ fundinmental