This Is How You Lose the Time War

Although I often felt so adrift in imagery and metaphor while reading this epistolary novella that I had a hard time grasping the ancillary plot elements, this inventive work left a smile on my face. The prose poetry of This Is How You Lose the Time War, if at times abstruse, gleams even when describing the horrific, and especially when describing the beautiful.

Note: unless I missed more here than I thought, it is never once explained how the protagonists travel in time. Some other key details I'd have liked to see elaborated include the inner workings of the protagonists' unconventional letter-writing and, indeed, the reason for the time war itself; these were either implied, glossed over, or outright ignored, which rankled me. If you must be told the “why” and “how” to enjoy a time-travel story, this book is probably not for you.

This book's saving grace is that it is not actually about the titular time war. At its core, This Is How You Lose the Time War is a romance, one that the travel back and forth in time and space ultimately serves to facilitate. In this respect, it tells a brilliantly original story of the triumph of love in the face of the horrors of war. I can't say I enjoyed this book until I really got into the rhythm of El-Mohtar's and Gladstone's worldbuilding-by-implication, but when I did get into it, oh, boy, did I.