A peculiar but often profound piece of metafiction whose emotional landscape offers more riches than its physical one.
What appears to be a typical children’s quest fantasy is more than it seems.
In Seanan McGuire’s Hugo-nominated Middlegame, the early-20th-century alchemist Asphodel Baker uses the pen name A. Deborah Baker to write a series of children’s books concealing coded messages to other radical alchemists. Now McGuire has taken on the Baker pen name and actually written the first book. Tangle-haired, adventurous Zib and obsessively tidy, rule-following Avery both climb over a mysterious wall and find themselves in the Up-and-Under, a dangerous and magical land populated by monsters, Crow Girls, giant talking owls, and other fabulous creatures. Their way home lies along the gleaming, elusive, improbable road to the Impossible City, where the Queen of Wands will surely be able to send them home…if the other kings and queens weren’t so determined to strew obstacles in their way. The plot draws heavily on the tropes of a stock 20th-century children’s fantasy, but the sharp and thoughtful perspective of the narrator transforms the book into a 21st-century commentary on such works. It also puts forth a deeply felt and carefully considered exploration of the foolish myths adults teach the next generation and the unpleasant consequences of parents trying to force their offspring to fit into a mold, with an emphasis on the negative effect on those children’s relationships with their peers. These themes link the book to the author’s Wayward Children portal fantasy series, which touches on similar issues. Middlegame readers searching for hidden alchemical meaning may not find it beyond the obvious naming of the Kings and Queens of the Up-and-Under after court cards in the tarot (often linked to alchemy). Selections from the text included in Middlegame also appear, but the author’s history in that novel doesn’t quite match up with what’s presented here. Middlegame places Baker as a contemporary of L. Frank Baum and her books as commercial and alchemical rivals with Baum’s Oz series. But numerous bits of context and reference within this children’s fantasy (planned suburban communities, a woman working in a street repair crew, playgrounds with slides, etc.) place it considerably later than the dawn of the 20th century. Surely that is a deliberate choice on McGuire’s part, but what does it portend?
A peculiar but often profound piece of metafiction whose emotional landscape offers more riches than its physical one. (Fantasy)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7653-9927-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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