Emily May's Reviews > Middlegame

“They grew up sort of weird and sort of wonderful and they found each other and lost each other over and over again. But this time, when they found each other, they came as close as they could to the Impossible City. They walked the length of the improbable road, and the girl wrote down everything she knew about the universe, and the boy read it all aloud, and everything was okay.”

Going into Middlegame, I don't think I actually considered that I might not like it. It didn't seem possible. I have given five stars to all the four books I've read in McGuire's Wayward Children series, and I just assumed this would be an obvious five-star, love-you-forever kind of read. I actually feel bad saying this, but this was not my kind of book at all.

There was a lot of stopping and starting in my attempts to read this book (which have been going on for weeks). I guess I just don’t enjoy being this confused for so long and receiving so little explanation for anything. The Wayward Children series is exactly my brand of atmospheric fairy tale weirdness, but this was a completely different kind of weird. A dense sci-fi novel that was at least 200 pages too long for me.

I found it frustrating and confusing-- one of those books where I was kept in the dark for so long that my attention was waning. Trying to stay invested when I had no idea where it was going or what questions I needed to be asking was hard work. And so much feels unanswered. While I’m sure this is wholly intentional, it didn’t quite work for me. I was left with the unsatisfying feeling that I never fully "got" it.

There's a lot of repetition, too. Roger and Dodger are "experiment" twins - he a word genius, she a math genius - separated after birth and placed with adoptive parents. They discover each other through a psychic link, lose each other, find each other again. Little is happening during these psychic encounters. Alongside this, we get the perspective of James Reed, an alchemist who wishes to use Roger and Dodger to get to the Impossible City. Unfortunately, I felt zero emotional connection to these characters.

Though this is supposed to be a math and logic based sci-fi, it is strange how very little is explained. The lack of details made it hard to picture and suspend disbelief for. I struggled to understand the motivations of Reed or how he really planned to accomplish his ambitions. The "Impossible City" is just a cool-sounding name being thrown around without explanation.

Probably my favourite parts were the nods to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which I thought were clever. But, overall, this book was for a reader very different from myself. I know McGuire also writes under her Mira Grant pseudonym, but I'm starting to think she might actually be several different people in one, because all her books are so different. I mean it as a compliment. Middlegame wasn't my cup of tea, but it's pretty impressive to have so many different tricks up one's sleeve.

CW: Attempted suicide.

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