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

Needs another narrator.

Great story and much of the narration was okay or good but some of it was so awful it took me right out of the story. She was trying too hard when voicing the antagonists. Considering the number of great narrators out there somebody didn't do their homework.

Mixed

There was some fun in this novel. The narrator did some things very well. However, to my taste she went too over the top with the speech of the main villains. As for the story, I felt that the two main characters could have been a lot more plausible as math and linguistic geniuses—even a little bit of math (or chess) knowledge is going to have you wincing here and there. Despite this, I found these characters appealing enough to persist.

Waxed poetic

I usually enjoy this author and I can legitimately see why this was an award winning book ....however it took way too many poetic privileges for me.

Repetitive phrases, unclear plot & slow character arcs made it difficult to finish. The reader is forced to interpret the language of the author 75% of the book, which is again poetic and repetitive. If you’re into that, then go ahead - but otherwise I would not suggest.

Also, the narration is freaking weird.

really good!

This is amongst the most enjoyable fiction I've read this year, blending magical realism with coming of age and identity in two otherwise regular children. while its prose did not wow me with remarkable turns if phrase or wit, it did propel a remarkable story at a well measured pace so the book never feels to drag despite spanning 30 odd years for the characters. this is not easy to categorize, it's not really science nor fantasy, but something speculative in between.

The narrator voice is a tad annoying

The story is good. I enjoyed it.
But omg the narrators voice for some of the characters is so breathy and annoying it’s hard to pay attention to anything else during those segments

Tedious

I wanted to like this book. The writing was good, but Roger and Dodger became so tiresome that I couldn't care what happened to them. I simply wanted the book to end.
Most of the narration was good, but the Lee character was so aggressively overdone it felt like the reader was vomiting words at me.
Don't waste your time or credit.

Interesting… look forward for a tv show

I just happened to buy it for curiosity and it pays off. I like the narration but also understands why so many people didn’t agree with the way the voice actor is doing it at the beginning but it helps with the way to think about the differences between the antagonists, having in mind they’re not “real” people, they’re concepts of the reality of the universe (if you listen or read the book you understand).
So at the end I enjoy it very much and could imagine it as the new “Heroes” TV show

It's almost perfect...

I enjoyed this book at least as much as any of Maguire's other books, if not more. And that is saying something as she is my favorite author.

However, Amber Benson was a terrible choice for narrator. She is a marginally passable actress and acting is an important skill for a narrator. Some of her voice characterizations were annoying, bordering on ridiculous.

Sometimes good books are re-recorded with different narrators. Maybe this one will be.

A Good Story with Unfortunate Narrator Choices

The story is interesting—not the best, but interesting. The issue is the narrator’s dialogue choices. The voices used for many of the characters were distracting and unusual. I kept hoping she would take a more listenable angle, but she never did. It’s clear she’s talented, so it makes me think this was an error in direction.

A Slow Burning Hand of Glory

Seanan McGuire builds worlds in a way that few writers can.

Middlegame's world is pretty clearly sketched out from the beginning, but our characters-- Roger and Dodger-- think they're the only odd things in a normal world, and for a time, each isn't even sure the other exists. Over two decades, their paths meet and diverge, and slowly... meticulously... they begin to understand what they are to each other, and to the mad alchemist who created them. They begin to understand what they can do. We meet them as children, as teenagers, as college students, and as adults. You can almost forget that this book has a plot, while still enjoying it wholeheartedly.

When the plot manifests in totality, the slow burn becomes a house on fire.