Special thanks to NetGalley and publisher for arc copy!

I enjoyed it but I admit I was expecting something more.
The magical system, although very interesting, is complex and it is easy to get lost in the details. Rules of the seasons based on alchemy, magic and science, Ascendands and Incarnations, King and Queen reign ... in short, the information crammed into almost 500 pages is really a lot, in fact I think it will need a re-reading just to grasp all the details!

But in addition to this magical system, I was not very able to empathize with the characters, especially Melanie and Harry, also thanks to a first part of the book (about 30% of the book) which did not involve me much due to a certain repetition of events. It is also a pity that the ending is so rushed.

An intelligent book whose strength lies in the very complex magical system but which loses a bit in the management of rhythm and characters.

Seasonal Fears casts all the same characters as McGuire’s brilliant Middlegame: teenagers drawn together by a supernatural bond they don’t understand, evil alchemists, evil parents. Middlegame was a mysterious page-turner with a clever structure that rewarded a second reading; Seasonal Fears is plodding and weighed down with exposition. McGuire is clearly off her game: every sentence in Seasonal Fears drags on too long, and the whole thing is repetitive, with characters meeting again and again to have the same explanatory conversations. The novel’s leads are compelling—golden boy Harry and chronically ill Melanie, childhood sweethearts turned living incarnations of seasons—but they're ill-served by the book as a whole.

If you love Seanan McGuire, if you loved Middlegame this book is for you. I find it always hard to review McGuires books bc they are so quirky and have the most unique format and structure that those of us who are fans immediately get and pre order whatever is next. If you are new to McGuire this isn't the book to start with; def try the Wayward Children series first and then see if Middlegame is up your alley. Then you'll be a devotee like me! That's the best way I can review this type of book: you have to read it first.

"From New York Times bestselling author Seanan McGuire, Seasonal Fears is the extraordinary companion novel to Middlegame.

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...."

Her third of at least five books this year... If she works a little harder we could probably get a book a month!

I love Seanan McGuire, but I found it a little difficult to get lost in this particular book. I didn't end up finishing, but I'm going to pick it up again down the line and give it another shot.

Thank you to NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review!

In general, the soulmate trope doesn’t do it for me. High school relationships? My cynical brain says they’re destined to end. But Harry and Melanie, the high school couple who were literally made to be together? Hoo, boy. Seanan McGuire flipped my cynical brain over with a combination of lyrical prose and phenomenal character development and I guess I’m a believer now.

This is a very different book from Middlegame (one of my favorite books of all time), but that’s not a bad thing. Similar elements remain: The storytelling style, the bursts of humor that never feel out of place, the sticky scenarios characters deal with all feel familiar. Characters were distinctly different in terms of how they saw the world and related to each other. This book played with morality in some fun ways, and while it didn’t answer all of my questions, I found myself nodding along as characters made increasingly dark decisions.

Only one thing about this book felt slightly off to me, and that was the pacing. Things were Extremely rushed at the end, and a couple plot points hinted at earlier in the book just…dropped off completely. These things didn’t make a huge difference in my enjoyment of the book, but the lack of consistency in this regard bugged me a bit.

Overall, a thoroughly well-deserved 4.5 stars. This was fantastic. Give me more morally conflicted characters doing terrible things in the name of love and magical power, please.

This book was complicated. It felt repetitive and overly descriptive. I found myself wondering if I had even made any progress. I liked the characters but they just felt flat to me. It is like something was missing from this.

A great companion to Middlegame! I loved the mythos of the seasons and the unbreakable connection between Harry and Mel.

This a weird one for me. First, it's a hard book to review. The things I liked the most from it feel like to say too much about would be spoiling. Otherwise, I think I went in expecting more of Middlegame and it's not Middlegame. It's something very different and I kept finding myself wanting it to be less so.

I did like some things. The characters were interesting and there were some interesting mysteries scattered throughout. I will say Seanan McGuire is the best writer of the fae side of the urban fantasy and fantasy genres. There is no better writer for forging works that feel both whimsical, mysterious and have moments of sharp menace as any good story in this genre should. This book is no different and I'm excited for it to come out and to watch the greater conversation around it begin even if I think it missed the mark for me personally.

It's supposed to be a follow-up for Middlegame, and I was hoping it had the same mysterious fantasy world vibe but no it was nothing like that. Maybe because it was an arc so it was less edited? I felt like a lot of the conversations can be cut out or shortened because literally, all they do for the entire book is explain the world of season and how it works.
The thing is the explanations never go very far, I always find them ending up with the same questions I have before. Honestly, at one point I swear I sense the author telling us 'This is how it works stop asking'.

They focused a lot on the two main characters, which is fine but I also felt like if we shift the spotlight away from the melodramatic teen love a bit we can get to know more of the other characters better.

Overall, this book was a huge disappointment. It could also be that I was expecting too much after I read Middlegame and that was a 5 star read. It was a bit less confusing than Middlegame since it's in a linear timeline, and because all they do in this book is explain to the MC aka the readers. It started out really well, like 20%. And then it was dragged on too long until the 70~80% where something actually happened, some events, but then it all felt rushed towards a very anticlimactic ending. This could be just a setup for the next book? If we're getting one. I sensed that it's gonna be a series but who knows. If that's the case I might feel better, but if not....😐
2.5 is the best I can give this book.
Not so much as a waste of time, but definitely is not worth my time.

I'm really enjoying the progression of this series - admittedly I also liked that this book was lighter than Middlegame. Seanan is unmatched when it comes to worldbuilding - and this book is another proof positive that her abilities in this are verging on brilliant. It's the same world, but the complexity and depth make it feel entirely new. Absolutely worth a read.

Another fantastic story from Seanan McGuire. Her books just keep getting better. I love that this is set in the same world as Middlegame so we can visit some old friends but it features new characters so it doesn’t seem like a retread.

Seasonal Fears is obviously set in the same world as Middlegame, but is a very different book in tone and focus. While Middlegame was dense and character focused, Seasonal Fears is more geared towards plot and world building (which actually made me really happy, though I can see how mileage may differ here. Personally, I liked getting some more straightforward explanations to the rules of the alchemical world). Harry and Mel are nice enough main characters, but they don't actually get a whole lot of development past the initial setup.

This is also a much lighter book then Middlegame, which feels like a weird thing to say about a very murdery road trip with its fair share of villains, but the overall tone and character arcs don't feel as dark as those for Roger and Dodger. Harry and Mel's journey is shorter and much more straightforward, with clear goals established early on.

My biggest complaint in Seasonal Fears is that I would have liked more information about some of the side characters. Jack and Jenny were great, and knowing more about them and how their deal works would be cool sometime. I also felt like Aven was a bit shorted in the end, but overall those are minor issues. Seasonal Fears is a solid mostly standalone follow up to Middlegame (though you should definitely read that one first), and I hope that it's not the last of the Alchemical books.

Thank you NetGalley, TorForge, and Seannan McGuire for the eARC of this book.

Were I not a longtime fan of Seannan McGuire's work with familiarity of her love of tacking a world/worlds from radically different perspectives, had I only read Middlegame and come to Seasonal Fears looking for more of the same, I may well have found myself disappointed and heartbroken. However, knowing that her work thrives on looking at all sides of any given proverbial coin, this was absolutely perfect!

The characterization, the cliffhanger, the world building... Seasonal Fears proves an excellent vantage from which to view the world and radically shift my understanding of its ins & outs as we take it in and join a new adventure, this time from the perspective of relatively normal protagonists rather than the pure exceptionality of those leading Middlegame.

Am I sounding vague? Good. Read Middlegame, brace yourself for something different but also in the same world, and buckle up - this one is well worth your time.

For all its promise, I think Seasonal Fears ends up taking the wrong aspects of Middlegame to run wild with. This book is absolutely swallowed in explanations and lore, some of it repeated and occasionally even possibly contradictory (very hard to tell), and the characters get lost in it all. Mel feels underserved (and Aven even more so), while I just don't think Harry is deep enough for the focus he gets. Middlegame was so rooted in Roger and Dodger, but here the protagonists feel incidental - and that goes too for reappearing characters who feel like flattened versions of themselves. So much of the dialogue is quippy without feeling witty, even when there is genuine charm and chemistry. I am particularly disappointed by where this all ends up ideologically: it feels like a complete overhaul of how Middlegame approached power (and the lack of racial diversity, already a problem in book 1, feels extremely egegrious here). This is a harsh review for a book that does have a sense of style and imagination, but this honestly makes me feel less inclined to revisit Middlegame, which is really tragic. I will stick around for future instalments, but my excitement has taken a massive blow.

Middlegame, the first book in this setting, was a revelation. With incredible characters, a sweeping story of treachery, alchemy, and people secretly battling for control over the fundamental forces of the universe, the book drew me in like nothing else had in years. So going into Seasonal Fears, I was ready to be blown away by a new alchemical masterpiece. Unfortunately, compared to its predecessor, Seasonal Fears is more like an interesting footnote in some larger work with issues that hold it back from being something I unabashedly loved.

There is a lot that I did like about Seasonal Fears, and returning to the world established in Middlegame was a welcome experience, even if our new heroes Harry and Melanie need to learn the rules of the game they find themselves in along with the reader. We do briefly get to check in with our old friends Roger and Dodger, which was fascinating as I thought Seanan did a great job figuring out how those two world-class weirdos would have changed and grown after the last book ended. The fantastical conundrum that our new protagonists are dealing with is also interesting (who doesn’t love an unasked-for conceptual coronation crisis?), with some twists and turns that had me excited for the big confrontation that I felt the book was building up to as the group’s road trip got weirder and more dangerous. Worldbuilding and sharp, fun characters are often a strength in McGuire’s other work, and you see a few great examples of that pop up throughout Seasonal Fears.

Some things felt off throughout the book, however. Explanation and exposition are some of my most glaring issues with this book, as it seems like there is a lot more of it this time around, or at least it is just much more noticeable then in the previous entry. I felt like I was constantly having something explained to me, sometimes I felt I was having things explained to me multiple times, which I’m not sure was a product of having read Middlegame or some change in style for how things get communicated between characters. I also felt that the book doesn’t really have as strong a set of villains as Middlegame did, with Aven being a potentially cool foil that I thought was underused and underdeveloped as a character. When it comes to our heroes, Melanie and Harry are fine as characters and there is some decent character growth between them, but I did finish the book wanting more from them.

If you loved Middlegame, you’ll probably get a kick out of returning to that world and seeing some of its weird corners get filled out with another adventure. I absolutely would not recommend this to someone outright, readers should start with the previous book to get a feel for the setting in its undisputable prime and some of the returning characters for context. A solid purchase for collections that have other books by the author and for dedicated fans of the genre.

Seanan McGuire does it again in this whimsical sequel to Middlegame! By definition reading is not meant to be a sensory experience, but much like it’s plot, this book bends the laws of space and time (or what I can personally conceptualize) and makes it so. The descriptions of the sights and smells of the seasons makes this an olfactory feast! This book gives a lot of juxtaposing characters and ultimately, balance. It does a great job of interweaving our beloved characters from Middlegame with new protagonists, Mel and Harry. We get an entirely new plot supported by the magic of the Up and Under. I would say you could read this as a stand-alone, though it would benefit you to read Middlegame first to understand the canon.

The book can be a bit heavy on the info dumping at times and spends a lot of time reframing the same plot points, but in an entirely self aware way. It somehow reads as feminist literature, while still having everyone’s favorite “touch her and die” trope (sounds impossible, I know). This book is great for readers who enjoy the journey more than the destination.

1) It is a good idea to read (or reread) Middlegame before this one.
1a) Very happy the Baker book for this came out first.
2) I'm sure it will annoy some readers in how it plays out, but I liked the contrast of having "real" people in this one versus Middlegame's Kids Who Always Knew They Were Different. You could write a five-page compare/contrast essay on how they take the situations they are in. 😂
3) This is a great example of a book with teen protagonists that is not YA.
4) It's a great book. It deepens the knowledge of the world by A LOT. I enjoyed the characters. It goes to places that other books, hung up on what "should" happen, would not. When I tell my roommate about it, I realize I'm discussing twice as much as I think I'm taking in. Sneaky, clever McGuire.
5) I'm giving nothing else away. Read it yourself. After Middlegame.

This is a hard review to write. I was so excited to receive an ARC because Middlegame by the same author was a favorite last year and I was ready for more alchemical adventures with familiar characters. Unfortunately, this wasn’t it.
This is a story about a boy and a girl in love who find themselves on a journey to claim the power of Summer and Winter respectively. What does this mean?
Honestly, it’s very unclear and as a companion novel it is only very loosely related to its predecessor. I feel like the author spent an entire book (Middlegame) dedicated to creating a strikingly complex world revolving around a collection of very specific concepts then abandoned much of that background work for a completely new and different area of the same world that involves other, even more difficult to understand concepts. If you found that sentence hard to read then I’m making my point.
“You keep using words and terms like we’re supposed to understand them, and that doesn’t mean we do” says a character fairly early on and this quote beautifully sums up my overall feelings.
I’m struggling to fairly give this 3 stars because while I did finish it I had no idea what was going on most of the time. I truly hope that with some aggressive editing the published version of this book will be infinitely more readable.
Disclaimer: I received this ARC from @netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Pub date May 03, 2022

#SeasonalFears #NetGalley Thank you to the publisher and @NetGalley for the E-ARC copy of this book. The rating of this book is entirely of my own opinion. #SeananMgGuire #MustRead2022