Title: Seasonal Fears [on Amazon | on Goodreads]
Series: Alchemical Journeys (2nd of 5 books)
Author: Seanan McGuire [Site | Goodreads]
Genres: Supernatural
Year: 2022
Age: 16+ (the characters are in the teen age range, but the series as a whole is geared to mature teens/adults for content and complexity)
Stars: 3.5/5
Pros: Fascinating concept (with a twist). Rich mythology. Characters you can root for.
Cons: Far too much exposition (counterintuitively though, the magic system takes a while to sink in). Some anticlimactic moments. A continuity error.
WARNING! Blood and gore. Violence. Suicide idealisation.
Will appeal to: Those who love a (bloody) twist on the soul-mates trope.
Blurb: The king of winter and the queen of summer are dead. The fight for their crowns begins!
Melanie has a destiny, though it isn’t the one everyone assumes it to be. She’s delicate; she’s fragile; she’s dying. Now, truly, is the winter of her soul.
Harry doesn’t want to believe in destiny, because that means accepting the loss of the one person who gives his life meaning, who brings summer to his world.
So, when a new road is laid out in front of them - a road that will lead through untold dangers toward a possible lifetime together - walking down it seems to be the only option.
But others are following behind, with violence in their hearts.
It looks like Destiny has a plan for them, after all… (Amazon)
Review: As much as I loved Middlegame, this sidequel (not a real sequel, just a story set in the same universe, though it follows the events recounted in the first book and brings us up to speed with its protagonists) missed the mark for me somehow. I would still have rated it 4 stars, if not for a continuity error - more of that below. Brace for the long-ass review...
(P.S.: don't you love it when a book cover finally matches your blog aesthetic? 😅 OK, it's my second McGuire that does that, the first being Dying with Her Cheer Pants On...).
MELTING POT
Seasonal Fears apparently leaves the alchemical world of Middlegame behind in order to embrace a classic supernatural/urban fantasy premise: while in the first book entities like Language and Math got alchemically embodied in artificially assembled hosts (in order for the alchemist to attain world domination...but it turned out that the hosts had different plans), in this case the seasons - namely, Winter and Summer, the most powerful ones - become manifest as well, but naturally, and by inhabiting human vessels. The trick is, every time the Winter and Summer crowns get to change hands, there are multiple viable candidates, who have to engage in a deadly competition (to be precise, they're already dead at that point - only animated by the tendril of their season that lives inside every one of them - and if they fail to secure the crown, their connection to it is severed, causing them to wither and die for good). Now, you might ask, how does this book belong in a series called Alchemical Journeys? THAT I won't tell you, because it's one of the reveals (though it comes pretty early in the story), but rest assured, it does. Leave it to McGuire to build a world where (pseudo)science and magic meet and thrive, providing a twist on familiar tropes and ultimately spinning a (mainly) original tale. [...]
