The narrative architecture really lands just to the sane side of experimental, and it is a tribute to McGuire's skills that it never actually feels all that complicated. It begins at the end of things (with the excellent opening line, 'There is so much blood.'), backtracks, sidesteps, splits and reforms. The narrative architecture really lands just to the sane side of experimental, and it is a tribute to McGuire's skills that it never actually feels all that complicated.Īnyway, some other things to consider: Middlegame has a complicated structure that demands some fairly close reading. The kind of book where you find yourself (myself) yelling at it in the middle of a parking lot, as though Roger could hear me telling him to JUST TALK TO DODGER. It's the kind of book where you want to reach into the page just to help them out, to warn them of what's coming. Roger hides his talents, vacillates between painful shyness and forced happiness, swallows guilt like water. Dodger becomes a champion liar, assesses social interactions like mathematical equations, doesn't sleep, harms herself. Forced to twist their talents into coping mechanisms for school and life. Absent Reed and the alchemists, Middlegame rolls out (mostly) like any other non-genre story of a couple of prodigies struggling to come to terms with the gifts they've been cursed with. And this is the greatest trick McGuire pulls here. They're its pulse and purpose - these two supernaturally gifted kids who come off like kids. Roger and Dodger are the heart of this story.

He is a monster (Frankenstein-style), created by one of the Congress's greatest members, Asphodel Baker, to carry on her legacy of experimentation and remake the world. Reed is an alchemist, a rogue member of the Alchemical Congress - a shady group of scientist-magicians bent on commanding and controlling the fundamental laws of reality. Separated by miles and occasionally by circumstance, but two halves of a whole.īetween them is James Reed, their creator, who made Roger and Dodger for a very specific (if still rather murky) purpose. As children, they grew up separated (him in Massachusetts, her in California), but were each other's imaginary friends. That was how they first came together - Dodger popping up one day in Roger's head to help him with a math worksheet. Destined (it seems, possibly by design) to never be long apart.Īt the beginning and at the end of Seanan McGuire's new novel Middlegame, it is Roger and Dodger. Telepathic twins, sporadically present in each other's heads and each other's lives. Twins, separated at birth, not entirely human. It begins with Roger Middleton and Dodger Cheswich. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Middlegame Author Seanan McGuire

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