After giving This is How You Lose the Time War a five star review, I started scrolling through other reviews and I found thoughtful, well reasoned arguments for the other side. This is a thoroughly crafted well written book that is not going to be to everyone’s taste.
The premise is two opposing secret agents, saboteurs, time and history manipulators who work for conflicting civilizations become aware of each other and start to exchange letters. It becomes a love story.
The nature of the work each main character does to manipulate history across many centuries and many parallel universes makes the narrative confusing. I can’t imagine it done effectively any other way, but I also like other confusing time shifting stories where the story starts to make sense later.
The characters only meet through their letters with a couple of exceptions, so some say the love story is unbelievable. For me, it reflects the extreme isolation and loneliness of their work and how even minimal tenuous companionship of a peer would satisfy a gaping need.
The writing includes extravagant romantic feelings and poetic literary allusions to go with the science fiction and time travel aspect. I appreciated it, but people who like romance and poetry don’t always like science fiction and time travel and vice versa.
The authors lean into the epistolary format. It’s not exclusively letters but a significant percentage of the writing is the letters these two characters exchange.
This book reminds me of some classic novels that also are somewhat polarizing.
>!Romeo and Juliet, (I know a play), Tale of Two Cities, O Henry Gift of the Magi!<
The creative forms the letters take were fun for me and seemed like a valid extrapolation of actual historical spycraft if you assumed much greater ability to manipulate matter. However some people find them over the top.
It is an exuberant, enthusiastic book that is fun if you like it and possibly cringy if you don’t
by boxer_dogs_dance
1 Comment
I wait listed this book at the library, it took weeks. I finally got it a few days back and I was so disappointed. There is little plot regarding the time war itself or the two sides or the larger view of what’s going on in the world with this constant meddling and timelines. You get a few interesting glimpses at their backgrounds, some info about the way their societies and biology are different,
but then its dropped and not explored further. I understand that you could argue that the point is simply the love story but since the characters just keep ‘meeting’ and communicating the way they do, I didn’t feel that was explored much either and I don’t see the point of placing it in a time travel framework in a very different future world if they were never going to explore those aspects.
Then I read about how it was written and I think it felt haphazard to me because it was. To me it just goes to show how much an author having a larger plan for a plot matters. Any threads put out there by one writer and then not picked up by the other were just dropped, and I feel like what happened over the composition of the story was that the most simple and mundane aspects of both ended up getting the most attention because it would be too difficult otherwise to tie it altogether and explore the actual time war and world building without coordination and planning.