Tidal Creatures

Starred review from April 8, 2024
Bestseller McGuire’s astonishing third Alchemical Journeys novel, following 2020’s Seasonal Fears, delivers a complex and thoughtful exploration of the intersections of mythology, philosophy, alchemy, and faith. Though the gods have mostly faded away, the Lunars remain. Aspects of moon gods made manifest through mortal hosts, they spend their nights illuminating the Impossible City at the center of all things. When the mortal aspect of the god Aske is murdered on the UC Berkeley campus, linguistics grad student Judy, who hosts the god Chang’e, feels compelled to investigate the death and quickly discovers that someone is preying upon the lesser Lunars. Meanwhile, the orange-skinned, hooved Kelpie, who believes her unusual appearance to be the result of an alchemical lab accident, goes on the run after her mentor is killed by her superiors in the Alchemical Congress. When Judy and Kelpie’s paths collide and intersect with people capable of changing the world with a single word, it becomes a race to solve the murders and prevent the Impossible City from falling into the wrong hands. It’s a joy to witness McGuire’s sprawling and diverse cast embrace the ideals of found family and chosen passions while defying their destinies. Familiarity with previous installments, especially Middlegame, helps, but this entry proves both accessible and unputdownable. McGuire has done it again. Agent: Diana Fox, Fox Literary.

April 19, 2024
The alchemists are at it again. This time, they're trying to build traps for the manifestations of lunar deities. One of those constructs has just escaped an underground lab. She finds herself in an unfamiliar world, the sun much brighter than she'd expected, everything she thought she knew revealed as a lie (for one thing, she's not orange and hooved because of a lab accident after all). She's lucky enough that the first non-alchemist she encounters is a boy named Luis whose mother is a hechicera (a kind of sorcerer), and willing to help a person in need even if that person was just yesterday an unwitting cog in the alchemical machine. Not far away, the local lunar manifestations have their own mystery to contend with: somehow, one of their own was murdered on the path between our world and the Impossible City, where she was due to shine, manifested as their Moon. Are these things connected? Of course. Between the embodied Doctrine of Ethos and the single-minded purpose of the alchemists, there's no room for coincidence. Despite the one-note villains--the agents of the Alchemical Congress are so obsessed with power at any cost that they have no space for depth--McGuire (Seasonal Fears, 2022) continues to produce entertaining adventures against a fascinating backdrop of a world very close to our own.

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