Review: Seasonal Fears by Seanan McGuire

Seasonal Fears by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was provided an audio ARC via Netgalley, all opinions are my own. I enjoyed the audio narration and felt the narrator did a good job with the characters and pacing of the book.

I really enjoyed this! I actually liked this more than Middlegame. This is a companion novel to Middlegame more so than it is a sequel. While you can read this as a standalone, I do highly recommend reading Middlegame first so you can understand all of the references to "The Doctrine", "The Impossible City", and Roger and Dodger's backstories. They do make an appearance in the book and while McGuire does a good job summarizing what you need to know, Middlegame was a complex book when it came to the alchemy involved and their journey. If you want a better understanding, I'd read that first. Personally, I want to go back and revisit Middlegame after reading this because its has been over 2 years since I've read it, and I feel like I might be able to better understand it now. That is a common thread with McGuire's books, I find they make me want to revisit them to see what I missed the first time.

This has a unique concept with the main characters each being tied to a season. I very much enjoyed the seasonal lore and the alchemical aspects of the book. Melanie is tied to winter, while Harry is tied to summer. Neither of them are aware of their ties to the seasons until they both collapse at football practice and a random girl named Jack shows up spouting a bunch of nonsense about crowns, seasons, and alchemy. Mel has a heart condition, so her collapsing has happened before, but Harry is in pretty good health so sympathetic fainting is not something he's done before. Harry and Mel have been in love since they were 7 or 8, and now as teenagers, they are faced with a very dark and deadly competition with Jack to guide them as best she can. Their relationship helps to ground and balance them, but they are unprepared to face what is ahead of them. As they embark on their journey to claim their seasonal crowns, they must accept that what they thought was folklore as their destiny. I enjoyed Mel and Harry, but I really enjoyed the concepts of the Jack's and Jenny's. Not only were they really great side characters, but they were unique in their purpose.

There were parts of this book that felt repetitive, and I agree with other readers that the ending felt a bit anticlimactic. I expected more from the labyrinth and the confrontation with Aven. This is much more character driven, and the action and plot suffer at the expense of the world building. There is alot of world building on the page, while some of the action takes place off of the page. This follows along with the author's unique style of storytelling. Like McGuire's other books, this is dark and at times violent. That being said I really enjoyed this road-trip style novel. It had a cool magic system, good world building, and I enjoyed the characters. I'm not sure if there are going to be more installments of this series, if so I'm 100% invested in what comes next.

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