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A review by timinbc
Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
1.0
Inside back cover: "she also writes darker fiction as Mira Grant". I read this right after the part where Leigh kills a family of five with a knife and some unexplained psychic power. What's darker? Making muffins out of the bodies?
I knew we were in trouble on page 29. The first time a character's eye colour is mentioned, and (fantasy readers, I know you're with me here) are they brown? blue? hazel? nooooo, they are good old gray.
Trouble got worse when I hit page 39 and saw "astrolabe" for what is obviously an orrery, a very different thing. You can't do that when you use the word for a CHAPTER TITLE!
So, we meet Roger and Dodger, and this was OK, except that it all felt quite familiar. I'm not going to look up which one, but it's certainly one of Rob Sawyer's multi-volume stories. It's OK, that can happen, it's not at all hard to imagine the ideas developing completely separately. It just felt odd to me, that's all.
Reed and Leigh. After a while I thought. "I am reading a graphic novel/comic in text format." I didn't notice whether Reed actually HAD mustachios, but he was sure twirling them, bwah-hah-hah! I gues it was important to McGuire's vision to have Reed and his creations be so utterly vicious, but it's not what I read books for. There's too much of that in real life, people wielding power simply because they can and they enjoy it, all the while marching toward an insane vision.
And so we develop, with one alchemist then another doing magical things in a magic system that isn't explained AT ALL, and I'm told there's even time travel later on. We're promised an Improbable Road and all kinds of stuff, and I'm so glad I came on here and learned that if they are ever explained it isn't in THIS book.
When I decided to DNF, it was because it was becoming clear - and I would be happy to be proven wrong on this - that Roger and Dodger are going to be horribly mistreated by this Bad Guy who's even more EEE-villlll than we thought, and it's going to be so unFAIR, and we're going to be told over and over again how powerful and unstoppable Reed is, and there's going to be a showdown, and R&D will finally realize their true power is Together (cue the choir) ....
Don't get me wrong; about half of SF/F uses some form of that plot, and I'm OK with it. But I need it to happen in a world that's been worked out and partly explained. This one leaves it way too open, because McGuire has not at all ruled out that Reed can snap his fingers and make 259 Mr-Smith-Men-in-Black copies of himself that can go invisible, fly and shoot death rays.
I don't care how weird your world is but you have to tell me about it and it has to have limits.
Yes, many people liked this, and good for them. I didn't say it was bad, just that I disliked it quite a lot.
I knew we were in trouble on page 29. The first time a character's eye colour is mentioned, and (fantasy readers, I know you're with me here) are they brown? blue? hazel? nooooo, they are good old gray.
Trouble got worse when I hit page 39 and saw "astrolabe" for what is obviously an orrery, a very different thing. You can't do that when you use the word for a CHAPTER TITLE!
So, we meet Roger and Dodger, and this was OK, except that it all felt quite familiar. I'm not going to look up which one, but it's certainly one of Rob Sawyer's multi-volume stories. It's OK, that can happen, it's not at all hard to imagine the ideas developing completely separately. It just felt odd to me, that's all.
Reed and Leigh. After a while I thought. "I am reading a graphic novel/comic in text format." I didn't notice whether Reed actually HAD mustachios, but he was sure twirling them, bwah-hah-hah! I gues it was important to McGuire's vision to have Reed and his creations be so utterly vicious, but it's not what I read books for. There's too much of that in real life, people wielding power simply because they can and they enjoy it, all the while marching toward an insane vision.
And so we develop, with one alchemist then another doing magical things in a magic system that isn't explained AT ALL, and I'm told there's even time travel later on. We're promised an Improbable Road and all kinds of stuff, and I'm so glad I came on here and learned that if they are ever explained it isn't in THIS book.
When I decided to DNF, it was because it was becoming clear - and I would be happy to be proven wrong on this - that Roger and Dodger are going to be horribly mistreated by this Bad Guy who's even more EEE-villlll than we thought, and it's going to be so unFAIR, and we're going to be told over and over again how powerful and unstoppable Reed is, and there's going to be a showdown, and R&D will finally realize their true power is Together (cue the choir) ....
Don't get me wrong; about half of SF/F uses some form of that plot, and I'm OK with it. But I need it to happen in a world that's been worked out and partly explained. This one leaves it way too open, because McGuire has not at all ruled out that Reed can snap his fingers and make 259 Mr-Smith-Men-in-Black copies of himself that can go invisible, fly and shoot death rays.
I don't care how weird your world is but you have to tell me about it and it has to have limits.
Yes, many people liked this, and good for them. I didn't say it was bad, just that I disliked it quite a lot.