Middlegame is a very weird novel. It is kind of fantasy, but more like sci-fi. It follows Dodger and Roger, twins engineered by a powerful alchemist wanting to control the world through their manifestation of Pythagora’s Doctrine of Ethos – the balance of language and mathematics. Sounds confusing? Well, it was, and 500 pages of confusion is simply too much, even if the main characters are just as puzzled as you are. The only reason I did not give up on the book is the prose, which is the kind of beautiful that makes you want to underline every other sentence. But the story just is not to my liking, and perhaps I should have known that going in. I think Every Heart a Doorway will be much more my kind of thing, at least I hope so because I really want to see Seanan McGuire’s prose narrate something that is easier to follow.