McGuire deftly and compassionately portrays their vulnerability and their shared, aching need to be understood – and the defensiveness they sometimes adopt in response. Growing up as a “gifted kid”, I connected really strongly with Roger and Dodger’s childhood experiences.Â The alienation from their peers, the strange cocktail of pride and concern from their parents, the incomplete solace of long-distance friendships – all of it felt familiar to me.Â (And as someone who can grasp mathematical concepts at an intuitive level, but who finds language to be filled with bewildering and terrifying ambiguities, Dodger in particular is dear to me.Â I have very rarely felt so seen.)Â The way the characters stumble through building a connection with each other resonated with me, too. Honestly, if you like her other stories half as much as I do, “Seanan leveled up” is probably all you need to hear.Â But there are so many things I love about this book, both in how it resonated with me and how well McGuire crafted it.Â I’m going to start by discussing some broad character elements and the first couple chapters ( which are available on Tor.com), but I’ll put a spoiler warning before I talk about anything past that. McGuire has said that it took her ten years of publishing novels to develop the skills she needed to writeÂ Middlegame.Â I’ve been reading her books for most of that time, and looking back I can see how she’s been building up to this.Â She has pulled together the best aspects of her various other series into one cohesive whole.Â Â MiddlegameÂ has the intimate, emotional character arcs of her Wayward Children novellas, melded with the tight, edge-of-your-seat plotting of her Mira Grant books and the gradually epic scope of her Toby Daye series, grounded in the love of folklore and children’s stories that runs through all of her work.

We may be only a third of the way through 2019, but I’d be surprised if anything manages to surpass Seanan McGuire’s upcoming novelÂ MiddlegameÂ as my favorite book of the year.

Middlegame novel