Bingo 18: Earth Day
Seanan McGuire knows her folklore, and it shows. In Seasonal Fears, there’s a ton of tropes, but mostly well handled. Basic plot involves the King of Winter and the Queen of Summer dying, and their crowns being up for grabs to those with affiliations for that season. The whole season emphasis thus qualifies for general environment theme, especially since the recently departed King of Winter was cheating the system where he was always in ascendance, which was probably causing climate problems. So there’s that too.
Tropes invoked include generic teen romance between childhood friends, one of them with fatal (?) health condition, the road trip, the life and death game competition for the crowns, a labyrinth, an evil twin side plot, the seasonal rulers (complete with Corn Jennys and Jack Frosts), alchemists and secret societies, other universal powers incarnate, discovering one’s family background is not what it seemed, learning to use your powers, the assigned helper sidekick with an attitude, the discovering of the alternate magical world that exists in the shadows of our own, etc.
The basic premise is interesting, and I liked Middlegame (to which this is a sequel). Problem 1 is that some characters from Middlegame do make an appearance, and it’s been long enough I don’t remember exactly who some of them were.
Problem 2: the entire first half of the book (and it’s not a short novel either) is a struggle between kind of starting the plot and all the world building you need for the main seasonal ruler competition to take place. It really slows things down, and both parts get in each other’s way. The characters in particular are themselves kind of tropish, and they don’t really develop beyond that which would be fine except that both Mel and Harry are a little bit boring and one note, and there’s no real reason why they’re together beyond being childhood friends, and now in their later teens.
Problem 3, even if this weren’t a slow read already, you can’t really read McGuire’s writing slowly. She’s good at it, and if you’ve read much of her work before, then you know you’ll definitely miss things if you try to speed read. So, the end result of all this is that you’ve basically got what feels like an eternal read going on, but that also kind of matches the quasi-eternal summer that been going on in the SE of the US (and elsewhere too).