Middlegame | Book Review

 Book: Middlegame (Alchemical Journeys 1) by Seanan McGuire
Release Date: May 7th 2019
Tags: Sci-Fi | Time Travel | Family | Twins | Psychic Powers
Trigger/Content Warnings: Human Experimentation | Body Horror | Drowning | Suicide Attempt | Self-Harm | Murder | Death

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 realise 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.

Middlegame is one of those books I’ve heard a lot about. People singing its absolute praises. Did I love it as much as them? No but I can see why it captured everyone’s attention like that.

Middlegame follows the lives of two twins that were seperated at birth. They were used for human experimentation to create something entirely non-human in a human body. To become the perfect vessels. They weren’t the only ones. Of course they know none of this. And across the country they find each other. Despite those higher up trying to stop them, they still find each other again and again.

Middlegame is a trip that you follow along with Roger and Dodger. Even though we know more than them it doesn’t take away from all the surprises we come across with them in who they really are. And even that, it isn’t really about that. It is about their relationship and finding their way in the world when the world has been shaped for you. To take back your own choices.

And it is strong in setting up the two unit between Roger and Dodger. Because it goes with heart, bumps and scrapes. Many scrapes but with a lot of feelings. Relationships, especially with found siblings like these, don’t come easy. It was realistic to see them run and turn away from each other. Their characterisation made me invested in the story.