Middlegame: Seanan McGuire’s latest book is weird (but very re-readable)

Middlegame asks you to buy in to a world of conspiracy theories, science, magic, and alchemy, and its compelling story carries it through.

It’s not often that this reviewer puts a book down and says, “I think I may have to re-read this.” Don’t be surprised if you do the same with Seanan McGuire’s Middlegame. It is a strange book, made stranger by the trappings of alchemy and what it can do in this world as well as a built-in, in-world work of fiction that gets alluded to over and over again.

There’s chess, too.

But through that strangeness comes a very human story of twins, Dodger and Roger (and yes, the rhyming is intentional), who split apart over the years but always, always come back together. They can’t not come together, in fact.

Middlegame is about a lot of things other than Roger and Dodger, though, since it’s about legacy and using that to reshape the world around you … and alchemy, too.

McGuire does a good job of what Dan Selcke has called the “keep it vague” school of worldbuilding. We don’t need to know exactly what goes into everything, only the responses to it and what it can produce.

There’s one point where this fails, and it has to do with Over the Woodward Wall. In Middlegame, it’s a plan to reach the goals of Asphodel Baker, a woman and an alchemist, hidden within children’s fiction. Some of the character allusions, though, don’t quite land unless you’re passingly familiar with Tarot, but they’re so few and far between that it’s a small blip in an otherwise well-constructed outline to how the world works.

However, for a book that’s just over 500 pages, it moves like a dream — or kids’ fiction, where things happen and happen frequently. If you’re reading quickly, you might miss things, or only notice them later, but they still end up being satisfying all the same. That’s part of why it deserves a re-read.

Mostly, though, it deserves to be re-read because it’s just that good, as it blends all of its references and stories into something that strikes true. McGuire’s shown a knack for series, but things like Middlegame and Into the Drowning Deep show that she can tell a standalone story just as well, in just the amount of length it needs to have, with just the right balance of the different genres pulled in.

This is a tricky book to pull off, no doubt about it. But that trickery is pulled off with the kind of aplomb that has become one of McGuire’s great skills. What a story to read (and re-read). If you’ve got a love for fantasy, you should read Middlegame.