Seasonal Fears

After reading Middlegame and Over the Woodward Wall I had really gained a taste for Seanan's ability to hint at things in a way that was delightfully hard to decipher. Reading Middlegame left me and my friend who were reading it together asking a lot of questions and discussing chapters with deep interest. Seasonal Fears, on the other hand, was more or less a straightforward and quite linear journey that didn't leave a whole lot to the imagination.

Oftentimes, I felt like scenes and conversations were being replayed to us in a way that felt like repetition meant to pad out the book. The protagonists are being put through trials that question the strength of their relationship, but it doesn't really feel like at any point that relationship is in jeopardy for more than a handful of pages before being resolved neatly.

The character who gets built up to be the main antagonist of this book ends up getting so little character development, and by the time they're put in a position to actually be adversarial to the protagonists, everything ends in a way that feels so anticlimactic and forced.

While I really enjoyed a lot of the side characters and interactions between them, I spent a lot of time feeling like I'd rather the book shift towards focusing on them rather than the main characters, who are decidedly one dimensional and boring. The fact that this book yet again focuses on two affluent white teens who live incredibly privileged lives is also not lost on me, especially when at one point we have nonwhite characters shackling themselves to white characters in what really is akin to supernatural slavery.

The ending of this book felt far too clean, and while I understand the need to write something more simple and sweet in its ending when writing during the pandemic, the nature of the characters really soured me on this when I realized this was just going to be another "rich white hetero teen lovebirds find eternal happiness" story