This book is absolutely beautifully written, for starters. It’s also often indescribably weird… but not in a bad way. Not at all.

This book basically follows two agents from rival sides in a war across time as they communicate with each other, becoming closer with each letter.

Most of the letters are very uniquely presented, whether in tea leaves, or lava from an erupting volcano about to engulf Atlantis, and so on and so forth. They are in different periods of time, or places on Earth, some of which only happened in some times, and some of which did actually occur in our own timeline, and Red, an agent of The Agency, and Blue, an agent of Garden, always just miss each other, or are observed from afar by the other.

Red and Blue are both strange and interesting people. They are human, or, at least humanoid (most of the time. At least one of them is a shapeshifter, you see). Both female, and both either genetically modified and grown, decanted, and heavily modified with cybernetic implants.

So, it is obviously super unique, and it was, in fact, unlike anything I’ve ever read in my life. Seeing these two women get closer and closer, and their letters get more and more intimate as the book goes on was really, really enthralling. The letters were absolutely stunningly written (but then, so were the parts between them), and I was clamoring for the next one and the next one as the book went on.

There were times that I would have literally no idea what was going on, but, and this is going to sound odd, but stay with me here… it was all part of the experience.

Example:
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“What is the value of pi to sixty-two decimals?”

“‘The sedge is withered from the lake, / And no birds sing.'”

A fistful of snow skitters across Siri’s face. “If train A leaves Toronto at six p.m. travelling east at one hundred kilometers an hour, and train B leaves Ottawa at seven p.m. travelling west at one hundred twenty kilometers per hour, when will they cross?”

“‘Lo! the spell now works around thee, / And the clankless chain hath bound thee; / O’er thy heart and brain together / Hath the word been pass’d—now wither!'”

-

This is only part of the scene, but what is basically happening here, is that Blue is responding to mathematical problems by quoting famous poems (Keats and Lord Byron in this case).

But I have no idea why! There is no explanation to why poetry is the solution to math problems in these riddles, only that they are, and that’s just how it is. And at first, I will admit that I stumbled on it, haaard. “What the fffuu-” said I, at first. But I shrugged it off as a weird book being weird and continued on reading. When I finished, and started writing this review, I looked up that quote on my kindle again and was like ‘Heh… awesome.” like it wasn’t the most random event ever. It was just… part of the whole.

So this book isn’t going to be for everyone, but it was certainly for me, in the end, even if I had to take a bit of time in the beginning to really get my bearings on what exactly was happening. I really enjoyed this book, but like I have no idea why poetry solves math, I have no idea what it was about it (other than the beautiful writing, good gods) that captured me and wouldn’t let me go. But that’s what happened.

Thanks to the authors, as well as Saga Press via NetGalley for the review copy.

This book is made of words.

Depending on your preferred flavor of literalism, I imagine you are now protesting either, "But so is every book," or, "Strictly speaking, this book is made of 1s and 0s encoded in the circuits of your phone." I mean something specific by my claim, though: certain sound-focused writers, especially science fiction poets (Amal El-Mohtar, Sonya Taaffe, Yoon Ha Lee sometimes) pile word on coruscating word, glistering. If you're an image-focused reader like me, the effect can be almost too much: each word is its own picture, layered, overbalancing. I worried about that effect, approaching This Is How You Lose the Time War: would I be overwhelmed? Certainly this is a book focused on individual words and associated separate images--agents braid time and dance through it, and you never quite learn how or wherefore, the process is the point--but I had underestimated the sheer exuberant fun of it. This Is How You Lose the Time War is an accurate title: it's a dare, from one agent to another.

It took me a little while to settle into reading, in large part because I was trying to sort out the differences between the two characters: one is named Red and one Blue, and about half the book is letters from Red to Blue about what Blue might be doing or vice versa, so it's easy to coast along in ambiguity. I eventually--more slowly than might seem warranted--arrived at the mnemonic that blue is like green and Blue is from the Garden future, where everything is more or less a growing plant. Meanwhile, Red is from a future of machines and artificially enhanced intelligences.

Red's first letters to Blue are aggressively silly (timey-wimey something something). The book's first shift in tone involves a ridiculous, over-the-top, embodied pun. I was hooked in around that point, the moment that Red and Blue shift from writing to each other as enemies to writing as rivals who might understand one another. The story shifts again after Red's superior, the Commandant, realizes that an agent from the other faction has taken an interest in her, and shifts once more as Red reacts to Blue's reaction. Somewhere in there I started sending my friends messages consisting entirely of exclamation marks.

The ending is complete unto itself: the promise of a love story and the promise of a universes-spanning, time-spanning rivalry, woven in together.

3.5 stars

I'll admit, I was confused by much of This Is How You Lose the Time War; it's set during a war, one that's throughout time, so there's a lot of jumping around and whatnot. I found myself skimming the chapters, and this is a novella so there's not much to skim.

However, it's in the letters where this book shines. Red and Blue are soldiers on opposite sides of the war, and they play a cat and mouse game across time, slowly falling in love. Their letters portray an ache that only gay literature can capture, honestly. I highlighted so many lines in both of their letters because it was hard not to feel their yearning and hunger for more, for a better life together. This book was truly peak gay literature.

This is a story told in vignettes and letters between Red and blue, agents on opposite sides of the time war. The book was an interesting idea, but it read more as a thought experiment that a novel. I did not care much for either character because they stayed as a sketch and not a fully realized personality. There are no side characters and the different threads are only lightly described so it begins to feel repetitive in parts. The ending was nice but a long time coming and while there was a nice reveal, the ultimate ending was no surprise.

I’m gonna be honest: I had no idea what was going on for a lot of this book. The fact that I’m still giving it 4 stars is a testament to the beautiful writing of the authors. The writing is VERY poetic and, while this book can be classified as sci-fi because of the time travel aspect, I can see a lot of sci-fi fans disliking this. This is because it focuses primarily on the love story between the two main characters, Red and Blue and not the time travel. In fact, while we know a war is going on (one that involves time travel), I couldn’t actually tell you what the war was over and who exactly the two sides fighting it were. This was a little disheartening. However, while I do wish that the plot and the secondary characters had been fleshed out more, I can’t deny that I really enjoyed this book. I was mesmerized by it. I downed it in a day and a half, which is becoming increasingly rare for me to do.

I LOVED this book. This is How You Lose the Time War is about two rivals on opposite sides of a war between two time travelling societies - Garden, where the agents are entwined with nature, and Agency, where the agents are cyborgs. As they wind their way backwards and forward through history, one side will light a fire and the other will try to put it out, on and on. Blue and Red, the two rivals, begin as antagonists taunting each other through letters, but those letters change in nature over time. This is a very difficult book to describe, but it was wonderful. Partially told through their letters, and partially through narrative, we see glimpses of their missions, and each one could be a saga on its own. This book was so unique and I'm so glad to have read it. Highly recommended.

Put simply, a fantastic book. A work of art disguised as a story. This is as close as modern literature has gotten to mythology in a long while. The characters and their world are faintly drawn but by the end of the book, they're both so clearly seen you could reach out and touch them. There are so many gorgeous turns of phrase that I wanted to quote them all (but I won't quote any; they deserve to be read in their proper context). I'm running the risk of being too effusive in my praise, but I think a book like this deserves it. It's a story that can easily (and should) be read over and over again.

This book is interesting. Not sure how I felt about it. The ending saved it. But up until then a bit of amish mosh.