Monday, November 14, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Seasonal Fears by Seanan McGuire

 




Seasonal Fears is the second book by Seanan McGuire in the universe she created with the critically acclaimed Middlegame (my review here).  I'm a huge fan of McGuire, but at the same time, didn't quite love Middlegame as much as other people - the story's world filled with alchemists who were trying to embody various concepts about the universe in human form, for the sake of acquiring power....leading to a pair of separated twins, Dodger and Rodger, struggling to figure themselves out as they manifested the forces underlying our entire universe.  The story had some great main characters, but the book's parallels with McGuire's invented children's book quoted throughout and the final revelations near the end just left me uninspired.  

Seasonal Fears is a companion novel which is entirely stand-alone and does not require knowledge of the original book, although it will certainly help due to that first book's protagonists showing up for a significant part midway through.  It's also a book clearly playing upon tropes and ideas that McGuire clearly likes and uses in other books - the idea of humans who are tied to and manifest powers depending on the seasons, the teenage loves who find themselves confronted by tragedy, and a race across the country to escape forces trying to threaten those lovers.  

And yet, Seasonal Fears was a huge miss for me.  I really never found myself caring for the two main characters or really invested in the conflict that brews all book between them and one of the major antagonists, and the plot here, like that in Middlegame, never really made an impact on me.  Whereas with Middlegame I really liked the protagonists and felt tremendously for them as they were put through the ringer, I really just found myself reading this without much interest, all the way through its conclusion.  

I'll try to explain more after the jump:  Trigger Warning: Suicidal Ideation (more like Self-Euthanasia of a dying girl) is a minor part of this book, although not nearly to the extent as in Middlegame and is never discussed in imminent detail

--------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------
Since he was a child, Harry has always loved Melanie, the dying girl who lives in his town. As a kid, he once snuck into her window by climbing a neighboring tree only to find her seemingly dead, but that didn't stop Harry, a boy as bright as summer, from continuing to love her as he grew up into a High School teen.

Melanie grew up knowing she was ill and likely to die very early, with only the medicine her father gave her keeping her just barely alive and able to get through high school. She's a girl with a seemingly always cold body, one seemingly made of snow, and hangs on to Harry's love to give herself meaning...until the day she knows she will drop dead and set him free.

 But Melanie is no ordinary girl and her father is no ordinary medical doctor, but an alchemist with plans on using Melanie to take control of the powers of the seasons of Summer and Winter - the powers of the Summer and Winter Queens/Kings. And when the current Winter King and Summer Queen unexpectedly die, Melanie and Harry find themselves connected even more deeply than they ever could have imagined, as they are hunted in a contest to take over those crowns, with the fate of the seasons in North America all at stake...
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Seasonal Fears is set in the same world as Middlegame and as such features a bunch of the same storytelling beats: each part is bracketed by an excerpt from McGuire's fictional Oz-like story - this time book 2, Along the Saltwise Sea - which seemingly parallels this book's story, which don't really do anything for me and seem even more superfluous when their author, "A. Deborah Baker", doesn't play any part in this book unlike book 1 (sorta). The book switches perspectives also between Harry, Melanie, a major side character Jack who accompanies them, as well as a number of side characters and antagonists - like Middlegame, the book's beginning often throws side POVs at you that the reader doesn't quite have the ability to fully understand at that point, but unlike that book, what's going on becomes more clear far quicker, honestly.

And really that's a thing about this book that kind of characterizes a lot of why it didn't work for me - so much about it's character and plot development seems shallower and much more rushed than in Middlegame, which made it a lot harder for me to actually care about what happened to the characters. So whereas in Middlegame we saw the two main characters grow up to see how they faced difficulties and turned out how they did (and uh, the resets that ensured they didn't turn out differently when things repeatedly went wrong), here we have a short glimpse with Harry as a child and then Harry and Melanie are high school seniors who are fully developed with their love as they get thrown out of the normal HS life into the strange world of powerful season incarnates and alchemy.

And this makes it hard to really care about either of them, since we never really see the moments that make them love and care for one another, or how they grow up to be the person they truly are (Harry in particular is a well off privileged white boy who is understanding and progressive in many ways, and well....that is certainly a possible result but it would be nice to see how he grew up that way). And so much about this book relies on that love - indeed the advantage Harry and Melanie have over other Summer and Winter candidates is how their love makes them "Parallel" and makes them stronger, but their love is never shown and just "is". The book basically assumes we'll care about these archetypes - the well meaning jock and the girl he loves who is the dying teen starling - without actualy doing any work to make me care.

And like in Middlegame, I found it hard to care about the magical/alchemical world centering McGuire's world: where human beings chosen by the seasons, and guided by others half-chosen by the seasons, fight to become the embodiment of Summer and Winter....all to do....something? Like the end result of it all is just Harry and Melanie getting some length of immortality and again I didn't really care. Similarly the antagonists are just hard to care about - from a spoiled rotten teen serial killer, to the main antagonist, a girl named Aven with a connection to Melanie and her own guide, a boy whose connection to Harry is so quickly referenced early on that when it comes back later in the book upon the inevitable confrontation (and you will expect this confrontation forever) I just had to laugh at how insignificant and un-setup it was. And the way the final antagonist is dealt with is just so anticlimatic, in part because she never really mattered anyhow and is so well lost due to the horrors of her upbringing that there's no point of doing anything more to her than her ultimate fate.

I know other people clearly have latched on to Middlegame more than me, and I've seen some very positive reviews of Seasonal Fears. So readers may disagee with me and this review and enjoy this book. But for me, it's probably McGuire's biggest miss, and she's the author I've read by far the most over the last 7 years, whose works I rarely miss out on. Ah well.
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