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

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.

Review in progress

I decided to start a short review, even though I am only about 2 hours into the book.
The writing is sharp, the narrative flow is good, and the story seems promising. However, I have to agree with other reviews about the poor voice narration. The voicing of the villains is so overdone and cartoonish that it distracts and frustrates. Makes you wonder who greenlights these productions. I will make an effort to finish the book, but I'm not 100% certain I'll be able to. I may end up buying the print version.

Middlegame is magic

This is an astonishing book, told with consummate skill through twists and turns that left me gasping. The language is lyrical and dagger sharp by turns, and the narration is unsettlingly spot on in creating voices for the characters.

Incredible book!

Writing this on a tablet, so I'll be brief: Seanan McGuire is a dazzling, mighty engine of stories, and this one is dizzying, stimulating, heart-wrenching, funny, intricate, and glorious. There's a ton here for lovers of fantasy and literature both. Wonderful characters used well, compelling plots and puzzles, and just...gorgeous words. And Amber Benson's reading brings it marvelously to life with the magic of a truly good reader-aloud, one who gives each character a voice that resonates.

Such an Imaginative Ride

What a bizarre read, and one that I don't think I can properly summarize without some level of confusion either by me or for you. However, I do think this will be a book that on some level is going to be a hard sell for most. It's not a bad read, it's just...confusing in an odd way that makes sense once you understand the shape of it but it's hard to really see that shape until you've made your way into the meat of the story itself. It reads a bit like a children's fable, fittingly like a slightly more logical Wizard of Oz and Wonderland, and like those stories, there is an edge to it that makes it something else entirely.
I seriously love the ideas that were at play here, and I love the complicated way that McGuire chose to express those ideas. It does make it hard to approach, hard to sink into, but the end result is something that stands out as completely unique. The only book I can think of that has some grain of similarity in terms of actual storyline and scope is The Library at Mount Char.

I'm definitely curious to see where this story leads us, and what more McGuire has to share about this version of our world she has given us.

Notes on the audiobook: Overall I wasn't entirely fond of Benson's choices in terms of individual voices, especially when it came to Reed and Leigh. Even at the speeds I normally listen to 2.5x or 3x, those two voices were still incredibly odd on the ears. Other that than I found the narration decent, with good pacing.

​Well Played for 17 Hours

​I started "Middlegame" on Thursday evening, before going to bed and finished it just before Sunday supper (meatloaf tonight). I bought this book by accident because of the cover. There are a few reasons why I like this story so much. The plot isn't so much outer space science fiction and there wasn't any butterfly fantasy either. There was enough balance from the twin siblings and their gifts for the concept to work. The characters were well groom and believable for 17 hours and 30 minutes.

Intriguing Story. DNF Due to Narrator

The premise of the story is pretty interesting, and after I got used to it, I was intrigued. I “bonded” with the kid characters and wanted to know more about their story. However, as others have mentioned, the narrator was too much for me to deal with. I really did try to give her time and adjust to her style, but she’s just bad, particularly voicing the villains. She reminded me of the yes-man from the Simpsons, or Aidy Bryant doing a comedic caricature of a villain on an SNL skit. I’ll buy it when it comes out in paperback.