MIDDLEGAME kept me guessing, but in a good way, as I traveled through the timelines. Roger and Dodger need to find a timeline where they haven’t broken faith with each other, where they love and trust each other enough to push through the final stretch of the Improbable Road and on to the Impossible City.
While the plot may be complicated, what makes MIDDLEGAME ultimately effective is that the character stakes are simple. MIDDLEGAME is structured around each “restart,” weaving a tale that builds slowly, as Roger and Dodger race to learn enough to find the correct timeline that will allow them to find the Impossible City (aka, their magic) before Reed can turn them to his own ends.
We meet Roger and Dodger at the very end of their lives.Īnd then everything restarts. In medias res might not even be accurate. We first meet them in medias res, experiencing a moment of failure, although we are not sure what they have failed at. Roger and Dodger (and yes, they know, the rhyming is an abomination) are part of Reed’s grand plan. Wary of their potential developing too early, he separates each set. Reed creates several sets of twins, each twin embodying either Language or Mathematics. Basically Baker believed that these two forces shape the world, and could bring magic back into it if they were incarnated.īy the time our story starts, Asphodel is dead and her work is continued by James Reed, the heir she constructed for herself from dead bodies and alchemy. She wanted to embody the Doctrine of Ethos, which McGuire describes as the “balance between language and mathematics” (kindle location 108). It’s effective because McGuire centers a complex story structure around compelling and simple character stakes to make an unusual story.Īsphodel Baker, a talented alchemist who was ignored and underestimated because she was a woman, had a big idea. MIDDLEGAME takes the ‘low and slow’ approach, revealing its secrets bit by bit. It requires a little more work and patience from your reader, but once you figure out the game, it can heighten the pleasure inherent in reading, the tension and relief of revelation. And while unintentional disorientation is the sign of bad writing, intentional disorientation can be fun. Others dole them out slowly, reeling the reader in little by little. A lot of books can’t wait to reveal all of their secrets.
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