A review by novelsandnailfies
Seasonal Fears by Seanan McGuire

3.0

Seasonal Fears is the follow up to one of my favorite reads of 2020, Middlegame. This book brings a whole new alchemical adventure with a new cast of characters. High school students Melanie and Harry are a pretty typical football player/cheerleader teenage couple on the surface, except that Melanie has a fatal heart condition, and Harry knows he will eventually lose her. But their lives as they know them are turned upside down when they discover the world and their places in it are far bigger than they could have imagined. To stay together, they must compete to become the living embodiments of Winter and Summer.

Sounds pretty confusing, right? Part of the beauty of Middlegame was the slow, teasing introduction to the mind-boggling world building, but Seasonal Fears lacked the same finesse. What it got right was fantastic characters that had me rooting for them right from the start. Where it fell short was too much exposition and not enough action. The explanations of what was happening felt fairly constant, and by the time the real action started, it was almost the end of the book. Seanan is a wonderful writer and world-builder, and I did enjoy this one, it just didn’t quite live up to the epic adventure that was Middlegame.