Book Review: This is How You Lose the Time War
Book Title: This is How You Lose the Time War
Author: Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
Purchase: Amazon
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Publish Date: July 2019
Description from Goodreads:
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.
Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There's still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
I enjoyed reading this sapphic love story spanning across time. It reads super quickly (short, short chapters) as long as you’re into poetic prose. If not, I imagine it would become a weird and confusing slog.
I liked the pop culture references throughout and personally loved the purple prose (I’m a Laini Taylor fan and it doesn’t get more purple than Strange the Dreamer soooo). But I would’ve liked to understand this world better; I don’t understand why the two warring factions—Agency and Garden—were described so sparingly, and would’ve loved more actual detail on what the time-travel agents are doing in their threads, what braiding entails, what they’re building toward, etc. When I read sci-fi, I want to understand it, not just blindly accept suitably futuristic-sounding terms and move on.
The ending was a bit predictable, and the main thing I struggled with throughout the story was differentiating the main characters known as Red and Blue. Based on the ending, that might be intentional, but I found it frustrating that the narrative styles in the letters each wrote were so, so similar to one another.
Their writing styles could’ve been a great opportunity for more personality to shine through and to help us understand why these two agents are falling for each other. Instead, their romance came across like instalove to me but eh, I’m willing to overlook that a bit given it’s a novella so time is of the essence (literally). I think I preferred Blue to Red but honestly they were pretty interchangeable.
If, like me, you were drawn to the time war plot, there’s no payoff there. The actual war was barely touched on and there wasn’t much in the way of plot or world-building. The focus was 100% the developing romance; the majority of the story revolved around both women chasing and leaving love letters for one another across time. There were some super cool descriptions of how they stumbled across each others’ letters and I did enjoy the overall concept, in addition to the writing style. That said, by the story’s end I was left wanting with a bag full of questions and few answers.
