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 realise 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.
“This has never been about good and evil. This is about power. Who has it, who doesn't. Who knows how to use it.”
Well if there isn't a better thing than a good session of mindfuck and „what the hell just happened“. Psychic twins, mathematics, alchemy, words, time manipulation – you just name it, Middlegame’s got it all. This book is a real piece of work for the reader’s brain, forcing it to pay close attention and soak in every detail not knowing when it’s going to matter the most. A tale of past and present, science and passion and love between siblings that can overtake anything has swiped me off my feet and left me in a sweet sweet agony of wonder.
But what is this story about?
It all started with one talented alchemist – Deborah A. Baker, who found a way of capturing the Doctrine – an alchemical incarnation that allows its owner to control the world. She hides her discoveries in the form of a children’s book, leaving it to her son, no – creation, John Reed to continue her work and create cuckoos which will embody Doctrine and, once matured, help him reach the Impossible City and rule the world. It will take him two centuries, a lot of money and loads of failed “creations” until he finds a pair of bodies that might actually stand a chance in manifesting the Doctrine.
Dodger is good with numbers. That’s an understatement - Dodger is a mathematical genius, but she’s so very alone and sad all the time because she’s smarter than everyone else. Roger loves reading. He has learned seven languages and read books worth three libraries by the time he turned fourteen. Roger and Dodger are twins, but they don’t know it yet. Actually, they haven’t ever seen each other – they just started talking through their minds one day when they were seven. As time passed, they figured they were connected with some sort of quantum entanglement, but that didn’t make it any less weird. Their rocky and complicated but special and irreplaceable relationship will survive a lifetime of ups and downs before they finally see they can’t live without each other.
I fell in love with their bond from the moment I opened this book, and there was really no going back after that. I’ll never get enough of sibling love in any form, but this book of struggle and a wasted lifetime hit the target. It pierced my heart, made me cry and laugh and curse those two dumb morons for running from each other while they could have their best friend and most important person by their side all along. Dodger was always in a rough place, but her loneliness was different from Roger’s. While Roger managed to find some sense of social normality and group of people to spend time with, Dodger was always a lonely bird – and that loneliness broke her.
“People who say “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” don’t understand how words can be stones, hard and sharp-edged and dangerous and capable of doing so much more harm than anything physical.”
When Roger left their connection, her self-confidence and already unstable psyche fell apart and created a gap that won’t be closed for another 20 years. The two of them were pulled apart, then thrown together again, but it took them way too much time to see how important it is to stop running from each other and find where they’ve always belonged – together.
“Someone made us. Someone made us, and then they separated us because we were dangerous when we were together.”
But what if staying together meant wielding power bigger than either of them is ready to accept? This science-fiction novel is based on the theory of splitting the Doctrine in two bodies which will, after they mature separately, be able to control the world itself. It was really confusing, but also magnificent and entertaining, to learn the boundaries and excesses of Roger and Dodger’s abilities. Time is a tricky concept to play with, but if done properly it can do wonders. McGuire created a stunning concept of timelines – controlled by the mathematics and equations – and words because one can’t go without another. Her amazing writing and pacing resulted in a thrilling and complicated story, easy to follow, but absolutely impossible to comprehend.
When running is all you got, and time means nothing, your crazy twin is the only one you can really count on, right? Oh, and also Erin, who is the biggest badass of all time.
“Time is a concept invented by men who didn’t want everything to keep happening at once. Time is irrelevant.”
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