Middlegame

Seanan McGuire has written a lot of books, including a number under the pseudonym Mira Grant, and it’s only been ten years since she published her first book, Rosemary and Rue. Her latest lengthy opus, Middlegame, could not have been written by a first-time author. Middlegame, at almost five hundred pages, is a world much like ours but beneath this naive reality is the magical world of alchemy that is alive and well.

Reed was created and has been around for a long time; gifted in the alchemical arts. His goal is to create the perfect pair of beings to discover the doors to the Impossible City. He has multiple pairs scattered around. When they fail him or do not manifest according to plan, he has them destroyed; their pieces recycled for future iterations. Roger and Dodger are the latest pair and are maturing into the geniuses they are expected to be: she is the math savant, able to understand and calculate the complexities of the universe; he the word master who can command anyone to do almost anything. They may be the ones.

If Frankenstein is the post-modern Prometheus, Middlegame is the post-millennial Prometheus.