[this review will be up on my blog, acquadimore.wordpress.com, on July 15th, 2019]

This Is How You Lose the Time War is a novella about a love that transcends time, space and humanity. It's beautiful and lyrical and heartbreaking; it's all of these things and I loved its ending so much that I don't feel like I can do this story justice with a review. Just know that, while this is an epistolary f/f enemies-to-lovers story set during a time-travel war, calling it that feels almost reductive.

It follows two entities, "Red" and "Blue", both presenting as women but who don't strictly adhere to our definition of what a human is, and there's a time war. If you're the kind of person who needs to know the reasons and the workings of everything, this won't work for you; it's often vague, but as I didn't feel like much more context was needed, I didn't have a problem with that.

The writing in here will be polarizing. At times, I hated it: it was pretentious, and it made me feel like the authors were trying to show off how many pretty sentences they were able to string together without saying that much at all. But in other places it was beautiful and powerful, and the foreshadowing was woven into this story effortlessly - which only makes sense in something about braiding time.
And you know what else makes sense? That a story about Red and Blue writing to each other would be 90% Purple prose.

In one of my updates, I said that I wondered whether this started out as a short story. If you've ever read some short fiction on online magazines, you probably recognize the metaphor-heavy style and the vagueness of the worldbuilding, and I mean, if I'm going to read something that short, I want something really pretty that will make me feel and won't need that much background to do so. I wouldn't have minded if the authors had toned all of this here a bit down, however.

I really enjoyed this reading experience. When I picked the book up, I expected this to be more quirky and funny, but what I got instead was a lyrical, beautiful love story moving against the setting of a confusing, twisting war across space-time. The writing is excellent, the story is interesting and takes some unexpected beats, and the characters were fully realized and fascinating. I really hope these writers do another collaboration in the future, because this was a gem.

~~~~~TO BE POSTED WITHIN 2 WEEKS BEFORE PUBLICATION AT @elle_reads instagram~~~~~
~~~~~POST 1~~~~~
QOTD: Would you rather be a cyborg or an elf?
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CYBORG OR ELF
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Depends…am I in this world or a magical world? If I’m in today’s world, I would rather be a cyborg. Airport security might be a pain, but at least I can explain my existence. I worry an elf might be kidnapped for experiments. If I was in a magical world with all the high fantasy races, I would love to be an elf! I would make collecting books for a huge library the singular goal of my immortal life.
//
Amal El-Mohter and Max Gladstone’s upcoming work This is How You Lose the Time War has both!

~~~~~POST 2~~~~~
QOTD: Do you write letters?
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WRITING LETTERS
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Unpopular opinion: I love to write thank you notes. It feels great to recognize the extra steps another took for me and just spread the love! I find it relaxing to finally stuff the envelope and send it out! Amal El-Mohter and Max Gladstone’s upcoming work This is How You Lose the Time War is partially (mostly?) comprised of letters between two rival agents.
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“There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there?” (loc 401)

~~~~~POST 3~~~~~
BOOK REVIEW
[This Is How You Lose the Time War] Red and Blue form a relationship through letters in the midst of time’s fraying braid.
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WHAT I LIKED
Cyborgs and mythical nature-lovers jumping through time to secure their alliance’s outcome? Sounds AWESOME! I loved the concept of time in Amal El-Mohter and Max Gladstone’s work. Their commentary on humanity through different historical or mythical moments was my favorite aspect of this book. I particularly loved the idea of Atlantis in the time war.
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WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE
Sad to say…I skimmed through most of this book. The entire book is written in that prequel voice where everything is too epic and you’re just waiting for the main characters you will grow to love to eventually make an entrance. Except they never did. I didn’t find the writing necessarily poetic either. It was stagnate throughout the entire work.
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The main characters Red and Blue as vastly different beings with different upbringings, but they have THE EXACT SAME VOICE. There were small moments where I could tell one moment was supposed to be a particularly “Blue” moment, but it never went far enough. I don’t even have a good picture of the main characters in my head. I know one is a cyborg with a connection to her team’s group consciousness, but I don’t know what the other one is? A future human? A plant? An elf? I really have no idea even after rereading it to try and find out. All in all, this seemed like a barebones skeleton of a plot without any interesting and fully conceptualized meat.
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This Is How You Lose the Time War (by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone) ⚡️1/5

This book reads like one long poem. A love story, a story of war, a story of resistance to regimes, with truly gorgeous language on every page.

Certainly clever and imaginative, but the jury is still out on whether this ultimately was a satisfying read. I like the unique premise, and it is beneficial to receive the story from both Red and Blue as well as being privy to their correspondence that displays the development and deepening of their relationship. I wish that I had been able to stay within the characters' headspaces a little longer in order to fully grasp their experiences and the state of their world; getting this in mere slivers was often frustrating. Although I thought about throwing in the towel early on, I chose to stick with the book mainly due to its brief length. Perhaps someone smarter than I am can enlighten me on the true meaning of all that occurred on these pages.

Whoa. Just…whoa. Another candidate for “best of 2019” for me. It’s like someone distilled almost everything I like into one book – exquisite prose, a high dose of weirdness, a queer relationship, a more literary feel, experimental structure – and the end result is breathtaking. Brilliant in a way I’m not sure a review can illustrate. It has to be read to be believed.

(Footnote for fans of the romance genre: for the sake of proper expectations, this is a love story but is not romance genre-wise – if anyone rec’d it as such…🤦)

The plot is so simple it’s almost not worth describing: two rival agents from the opposite sides of the time war start exchanging letters in secret. A tale as old as time (heh). You can probably guess the broad strokes of where it goes from there and you’d probably be correct, too. But I don’t think reducing it like this does it justice. Not even close. It’s two lives circling around each other but never quite touching. It’s loneliness and longing and finding solace in each other, the war be damned. Technology and nature. It’s heady and strange, a book to be savoured rather than devoured.

The prose is ridiculously good. Absolutely on the stained glass side – poetic, reminiscent of Samatar’s The Winged Histories, and practically begging to be read out loud. I could drown in it; I don’t know how to give it higher praise than that. Another thing that reminds me of The Winged Histories is that the war itself, which would be front and centre in most books, is merely a background detail, context for the characters and their interactions (the true main focus) but largely glossed over. The alternation between letters and chapters describing where they find them adds to the disconnect. To be clear, it’s nowhere near a bad thing – just different. Unconventional.

And it’s weird in terms of setting, too. Profoundly, gloriously weird. It’s a world where poetry is the answer to math riddles, where letters are written in seeds and water and poison and hidden behind eyes, where everything including time is fluid and seemingly anything goes. After all, all is fair in love and war. And that’s the beauty of it. Relax, enjoy the wild ride.

I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, as it’s highly experimental fare, but those of us who fall for the stuff will fall hard. It’s absolutely my catnip and I can already see it winning all the awards.

Recommended to literary fantasy fans, prose fans, those looking for f/f representation, anyone who enjoyed The Gray House / The Winged Histories / The Only Harmless Great Thing / City of Saints and Madmen

I love the concept of this book, and some bits are super creative and interesting, but the style just didn't really work for me. The constant switches between epistolary and regular prose sections -- not to mention the fact that the two protagonists, known as Red and Blue, sound exactly the same -- made it quite difficult to follow which POV was being expressed at any given time. And throughout, the writing was just extremely poetical. I am glad that poetical sci-fi queer romance exists, but I guess it's just not my favorite subgenre!

I enjoyed the last third, in which some relevant world building and context are finally (FINALLY!) revealed, including some much needed dialogue from additional characters. All of this brought life and narrative tension where before there had been precious little of either.

Ultimately, this is an "Emperor's New Clothes" kind of book. That is, the kind that makes many readers afraid to admit that they didn't like it, or didn't get it, for fear of everyone else thinking they are dumb or uncool. To all such readers: it's not just you.

“I keep turning away from speaking of your letter. I feel – to speak of it would be to contain what it did to me, to make it small. I don’t want to do that. I suppose in some ways, I’m more Garden’s child than she knows.

Even poetry, which breaks language into meaning – poetry ossifies, in time, the way trees do. What’s supple, whipping, soft, and fresh grows hard, grows armo. If I could touch you, put my finger to your temple and sink you into me the way Garden does – perhaps then. But I would never.

So this letter instead.

I ramble, it seems, when writing to the darkness by hand. How embarrassing. I’m quite certain I’ve never rambled a day in my life before this. Another thing to give to you: this first, for me.

Yours,

-Blue”

This book is poetic, romantic, strange, and violent – a whirlwind of emotion, fear, and firsts. Two soldiers fighting on opposite sides of a war up and down through the strands of time find that their greatest joy lies in each other, and thus begin a correspondence. They are two parallel lines that never meet despite having shaped one another through each of their interactions.

Whatever I can say about this novella will not do it justice. This book is utterly, wholly, an experience in and of itself. It’s the act of reading the prose. It’s the empathy you feel at the characters’ want for one another. Honestly, if you want to know whether you’ll like this book… read an excerpt on Amazon, because the first few pages will definitely tell you whether or not this is for you.

Red is an agent of the Commandant – she is violence and destruction, tearing worlds and civilisations down across time to force history upon a new path.

“She holds a corpse that was one a man, her hands gloved in its guts, her fingers clutching its alloy spine. She lets go, and the exoskeleton clatters against the rock. Crude technology. Ancient. Bronze to depleted uranium. He never had a chance. That is the point of Red."

Blue is an agent of Garden – she cultures timelines by pruning and training the strands far in advance, setting up a new avenue for the future to grow into.

“When Blue wins – which is always – she moves on to the next thing. She savors her victories in retrospect, between missions, recalls them only while travelling (upthread into the stable past or downthread into the fraying future) as one recalls beloved lines of poetry. She combs or snarls the strands of time’s braid with the finesse or brutality required of her, and leaves.”

Each follows one another across the various strands of time, intersecting with one another, undoing each other, delighting in the cleverness of their counterpart. What Blue sets in motion, Red endeavors to destroy; what Red destroys, Blue has planned for and planted a pyrophytic seed ready to sprout in the smoldering flames left behind. Through it all, they write letters in lava, in poison, and in the very fibers of the universe itself.

“The shifting colors form words that last mere moments, in handwriting now familiar. As the lava flows, those words change. She reads.”

. . .

“. . . Hunger, Red – to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth – is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened it so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out?

Sometimes I think that’s what I have instead of friends.

I hope it isn’t too hard to read this. Best I could do on short notice – hope it reaches you before the island breaks around you.

Write to me in London next.

-Blue”

In one another, they find the connection they’ve been lacking. They have no true peers, for they are each the best of the best, and no friends within their ranks who they can relate to. They are solitary, alone, and hungry for the empathy of one who can understand. Yet, what they crave destroys them, piece by piece, as their warring civilizations clash and churn, forcing them to tear themselves down to protect the other.

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone are a team that we neither deserved nor expected. This is a small masterpiece.

My process reading this book went like this
30% - I don't like this, I think I'm going to put it down (I did not)
50% - Holy crap, this is fascinating. I'm not invested but I am interested
75% - I'm so freaking invested in this I can't stop reading
100% - Holy shit that was good.

Told in epistolary format and alternating chapters that provide a glimpse into the lives of Blue and Red, This is How You Lose the Time War is unlike anything else I've read. This is a weird book, and I don't think it will be for everyone. It's poetic and sharp, no one feeds you the world building on a spoon and it takes some time to put together the pieces. In short, it's a romance between enemies on opposite sides of a war. But it's nothing so simple.

As another reader suggested in their review; perhaps this book was too poetic for me. I could not get into it at all. I was very disappointed as the description had me chomping at the bit to read this one. It was too abstract for me. I did complete the book, but only because it was a very short read.

I'm not sure what I just read. This book is totally unique. I kept trying to find symbolism or perhaps a parallel to another work of art. I felt like I wanted to take a class to study it. And I'll probably spend an inordinate amount of time in book forums trying to figure it out. Poetic, so poetic, yet sci-fi. I wanted to know more about the Agency and the Garden. What do they really represent? The management of time and time travel in this book was also unique to any other time slippage novels I've read. Strands of time were braided and our protagonists could travel up and down them to different points in time. However the concepts were kept very abstract. The story is actually told in letters back and forth between the two protagonists, though not necessarily the type of letter you write or type. This is where the author shines. The creativity is outstanding. Communicating through mediums perhaps like plants or animals? Now I'll have to research this! This book is not for everyone but it is not one I'll soon forget.

This book is everything. THIS BOOK IS EVERYTHING.

This is the best thing I've read since Circe ripped my heart out last year. 

It's one of those precious, rare books that somehow managed to leave me in great, gasping, sobs, but also feeling full to bursting. The kind that feels like it's carved itself into the squishy meat of my heart.

That was just........... So perfect. SO PERFECT.

Gorgeous. I loved every word. The letters between Red and Blue were so clever and creative. Their progression from taunting messages to adoring confessions was breathtaking.

In this book, the story is told of two agents of competing agencies who are competing to win a war over time and what the world will look like. I found the story engaging and easy to read. However, I would have liked to see more world building, as it often felt confusing to keep track of what was happening in the story. I also thought that the character development could have been improved, as there were often vague descriptions of the motivations of the characters.

Red and Blue are agents from opposite sides of an eons-long war between two factions, continuously sent back in time to change the past (Terminator-style) with the intent of altering the future. Their first communication is through letters - an exchange in which each takes pleasure in thwarting the other. Over time, the connection turns into something more, a connection that could cost them their lives if discovered. The story is told via alternating viewpoints, with Amal El-Mohtar writing one protagonist's perspective and Max Gladstone writing the other. The narrative starts out slowly, with the first 20% of the book providing snippets of world-building interspersed by letters, and only after the connection between Red and Blue deepen does additional knowledge about the overarching world emerge. I liked the concept of the book but my personal preference is for a richer and more complex story. The ending was a bit rushed, and a little bit too convenient, but overall still an enjoyable read.

This is a really special book. I had read a description of it online before this ARC became available and was immediately intrigued; I was happy to discover the execution did not disappoint. I plan on reading it again, because I'm sure I missed details and subtleties the first time around, but I loved the vivid language, the bond between Red and Blue, and the portrayal of love as the ultimate revolutionary act. I'll definitely be recommending this to people.

I very much enjoyed the character-building, the dance between Red and Blue throughout time and space, and the world(s) they live in. Nothing was overdone or heavy-handed, but everything was aching with meaning and left me wanting more. The writing was beautiful, and the world-building was grand. A lovely read.

I like this fast-paced and beautiful writing style of a war time period where two sides on the field of war was exchanging love letters to one another. Of course, at first that wasn’t their intention. But as they continued to exchange letters, they fell in love. Love this concept by the way! It is a unique, beautiful love story like Romeo and Juliet, but about time war travelers, and they are potential enemies. I love the ending and usually I don’t like an ending with a cliffhanger but this one settled in nicely and beautifully. I do however would have to read this book the second to get a better understanding of the story.

This is interesting and different. There seems to be mostly love for this book with a few un-lovers and I understand why. With an unusual writing style it was not a book to skim. But I like sci-fi and this was uniquely entertaining. Not great for me, but very good. I probably need to read it again. Nonetheless, I recommend this, particularly if you're not looking for a quick read.

I really appreciate the complimentary copy for review!!

A beautifully rendered love story, which may or may not end happily, but tha't what time travel is for. Lyrical prose, as deft as poetry. Highly recommended.