Middlegame by Seanan McGuireMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Seanan McGuire is a very prolific author, and sometimes that shows in her books--all well written, some come off formulaic. The beginning of Middlegame seems like it's going to go that way. Then it takes an incredible left turn and you get a set of characters that have more depth and complexity than it seems like real humans can have, even. I spread my reading out over several nights, and this book kept me up past bedtime several times.
The trope of soul mates finding each other through remote presence is worked really well here. Roger and Dodger are the embodiment of Math and Language, and they complete each other. The book weaves the plot and their growth together seamlessly, one couldn't happen without the other. And then halfway through the book we get Erin, another embodiment with equal depth. Really amazing work.
The plot underneath is sort of ordinary, and that's fine. Alchemy is real (and sort of like magic), and several famous figures (Twain, Baum, etc.) have been working on it. The (self-proclaimed, and there's a lot of this) best alchemist in history was a woman ahead of her time, and wrote a fantasy primer on it disguised as children's literature. Her constructed protege (just like Frankenstein's monster, so I guess he was an alchemist too), James Reed, aims to complete her work. And this is why I can't give it a full 5 stars--the villains (Reed and his construct assistant Leigh Barrow) are both cardboard characters--over the top embodiments of evil. Comic book speech bubbles couldn't save them. So they are foils for the real stars. Also the ending involves what I think of as literary cheating, but endings are hard, particularly so for such a sweeping work.
Hands down the best thing I have read from McGuire, and it shows what she can really do. I hope she'll go for this level of quality over quantity all the time.
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