Middlegame, Seanan McGuire

[beccaelizabeth]

I had been putting off reading this one because I heard it had some upsetting content and I did not want to be upset.
... earlier me had a point.
Warnings for child abuse, children in danger, murder (lots), murder of children, attempted suicide, and maybe suicide. ... I feel like there's more but so far I'm just thinking of more murder etc. Screaming and that nightmare thing where no one can see them or try and help. Sometimes paralysis. While children are murdered. Warnings.

It is a very well written book. Very tense, and you are never sure of the ending, which is a good trick considering the major superpower demonstrated is the ability to rewind time and restore to an earlier save point. It's not enough to save... many people. Turns out getting a do over where you dont remember what happened the first time is still a Problem.

I liked the ending but there were parts of the middle when I was pretty sure I had chosen to pick up the wrong book. Wasnt ready to go that dark.

Also by the end of the book the cover weirdly annoyed me. It looks like a wax hand with its fingers on fire, a hand of glory, a magic item that turns up in the book. But it also looks like a model. A clean thing. A pretend.

Any time the hand turns up in the book it doesnt let you forget that someone in personal particular died to provide it. Each hand gets enough description you can tell it is a different person. The magic is made out of treating people as parts.

It's a central image of the book. It unifies and highlights a lot of what was going on.

And I'm fully aware that putting it on the cover looking any more realistic or mummified or gory or anything would have been really counterproductive to getting people to buy the book.

But it looks too clean and it ended up a focus for my growing ire.


The book is about children just trying to survive. There's snippets 'quoted' of another book, a children's book, which looks like kids set out to have adventures. This isnt like that. The kids just want to survive. The consequences are grand scale, but the setting is just, like, classrooms, and libraries, and university housing, and going home for thanksgiving. Just trying to live their lives, and all the ways they weren't going to get to do that.

There are many places in the middle you are not sure they'll reach the end.

And many places where you want them to hit undo again. And you can follow the logic why not, but, it goes some dark places.

I get hung up on time travel stories and the idea of doing things over again until you get them right. Stuff keeps happening and you'd rather they unhappened the pain. But like Picard in Tapestry every terrible moment leads to them being the person who can reach the next.

You still want though.

I think because the calmer happier life they could of had should just be normal. But people want very specific things from them, so they dont get normal.




I think I'm going to be glad I read it. All the way to the last page.


But that was a trip through some dark places
and several times I found I had stopped to think about calmer happier things instead
so that took longer to read than the page count suggests.


It was well written though.

Comments

[executrix]

The problem with the cover is that it is identical to the cover of her previous book, so I couldn't tell if I had read it already or not.

Also, Ninth House is written by someone different than Gideon of the Ninth and Harrow of the Ninth.

[beccaelizabeth]

I have not seen another book with middlegame's cover. Which one do you mean?

[executrix]

I can't remember the title, just that I looked at the blurb and said, nope, I read another one of her books but not that one.