Middlegame

By: Seanan McGuire

Narrated by: Amber Benson

Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's summary

A Locus Award Finalist!

This program is read by Amber Benson.

New York Times best-selling and Alex, Nebula, and Hugo-Award-winning author Seanan McGuire introduces listeners to a world of amoral alchemy, shadowy organizations, and impossible cities in the stand-alone fantasy, Middlegame.

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.

©2019 Seanan McGuire (P)2019 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

2019 NPR Best Book of the Year
2019 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year
2020 Hugo Award Nominee
2020 Locus Awards Nominee

It's almost perfect...

I enjoyed this book at least as much as any of Maguire's other books, if not more. And that is saying something as she is my favorite author.

However, Amber Benson was a terrible choice for narrator. She is a marginally passable actress and acting is an important skill for a narrator. Some of her voice characterizations were annoying, bordering on ridiculous.

Sometimes good books are re-recorded with different narrators. Maybe this one will be.

A Good Story with Unfortunate Narrator Choices

The story is interesting—not the best, but interesting. The issue is the narrator’s dialogue choices. The voices used for many of the characters were distracting and unusual. I kept hoping she would take a more listenable angle, but she never did. It’s clear she’s talented, so it makes me think this was an error in direction.

A Slow Burning Hand of Glory

Seanan McGuire builds worlds in a way that few writers can.

Middlegame's world is pretty clearly sketched out from the beginning, but our characters-- Roger and Dodger-- think they're the only odd things in a normal world, and for a time, each isn't even sure the other exists. Over two decades, their paths meet and diverge, and slowly... meticulously... they begin to understand what they are to each other, and to the mad alchemist who created them. They begin to understand what they can do. We meet them as children, as teenagers, as college students, and as adults. You can almost forget that this book has a plot, while still enjoying it wholeheartedly.

When the plot manifests in totality, the slow burn becomes a house on fire.

Beautifully written

Seanan McGuire is damn near an autobuy for me and this confirms just how good she is. The characters are vivid and the world buildingis rich and interesting.

Warning, there is some rough stuff in this book so if you're sensitive to some common triggers you might want to look up the author's trigger warnings on this book.

Fascinating. Flumoxing. Freaking scary!

And this could absolutely happen right now. A must read from McGuire for literature lovers, young and old.

⚖️ Plot: As with any book with time travel involved, it needs to be crystal clear to follow. I wish there was only a prologue in which time skipped and the rest fallowed naturally. The literary references were too many and too frequent for me and jarred me out of the intensity, but other than that, this book was fabulous.

🗺 World: Being set in our world, I could focus solely on the story and what a story it was! It was so filled with meticulous details that it’s impossible not to believe in. The research McGuire must have done to produce this is staggering.

💑 Characters: Because the premise was so encompassing, the characters themselves were secondary to me. I didn’t particularly connect with any of them, but I suppose that may also be a testament to the way they were created. As a whole, I enjoyed this story immensely and will think of it whenever mankind makes a leap in discovery.

cheesy audio performance but fun story

The story is fun and I blew through listening to this book. Regardless of any fault I found in the reading or even in details of the writing, I looked forward to whenever I found chances in my day to listen to more - just a good escape.
As far as the cheesiness goes, it was not just the narrator's fault, because I found the author hitting on certain traits of the characters over and over and over again to the point of annoyance, or maybe I was missing the point of making them caricatures. Like if someone is truly mathematically minded, I feel like they would refer to different concepts instead of just saying "the numbers don't add up" or "that's just bad math!" more like the embodiment of math on a kids' show would. As for the narrator, the main characters voices were fine, but the choices she made for the villains were bizarre. Like Jimminy Glick meets Pinky and the Brain. Great as a voice actor for certain animation styles, but good Lord, not here.

fantastic story

Seriously, the worst Boston accent I've ever heard from a narrator. Once you get past that, the book is hard to put down.

Simply fantastic

I can’t put in to words how good this was and how it makes you think

LOVE

I can't get enough of it. I keep thinking about this book and being sad that it ended, but happy it has a great ending!

amazing

magical and scientifical, a cross between fantasy fiction and sci fi. veery well constructed. would like it to have a sequel.