This Is How You Lose the Time War
Ratings1,133
Average rating3.9
3.5/5 stars
I said it in an update, but I'll say it again. I am too stupid for this book. It did start to click eventually and the words and story were absolutely beautiful, but I never felt like I got more that a superficial understanding of anything.
I'll admit the first time I tried to read this book I was barely able to finish the first chapter. The setting, the odd cadence of the character's thoughts, even some of the language left me scrambled and confused (not unlike, I imagine, a novice time traveler). But I borrowed it once more and, undisturbed by any deadlines or chores, finished this gem of a novel in a single sitting.
I laughed throughout at the playful banter and gentle way these dual protagonists teased, then tempted one another. I gasped audibly at the sudden introduction of a word that carries great meaning in any relationship. I cried at the absolutely genuine current of emotions flowing between these amazing characters, and my heart simply ached till the very last page.
I'm so glad I gave this book another chance, as it's truly one of the most memorable things I've ever read.
This is one of the most beautiful pieces of love literature I have yet the pleasure to read, I cried so so much, at first it felt dense given that english is not my native language, but I translated a few words here and there, I continued and thanks god I continued, I read it complete in one day (it's only 200 pages) and it took me out of my reading block immediately. A book that I will enjoy a lifetime and hopefully, in different timelines. Stop reading reviews, just go and read it, the feeling of the words tangling and making sense as you keep reading is beautiful and unmatched.
The concept was neat, but the writing style was not my cup of tea. Flowery prose can be nice but when most of the novel consists of ooey gooey love letters it becomes a bit tiresome and repetitive to read. I would have liked the writing styles between the two main characters to be more distinct from each other to make the letter-chapter-letter-chapter format feel less repetitive.
Despite the story being quite short and very little happening plot-wise, it began to feel like I had to slog through a lot of unnecessary descriptive language to get to any real character development or plot points!
It's a weird one. The book is two genres - scifi and romance. Or more accurately, it is romance with a scifi setting. Unfortunately, the romance was weak, and I was more interested in the actual time war, which made this a chore to read. I don't particularly mind reading love burgeon through letters. It's just that the letters were a bit ridiculous and took themselves and words and metaphors too seriously. It felt very high school. Very try hard. But it did not feel romantic. And I was not convinced that two could fall in love through these letters.
Also, the two protagonists were too interchangeable. It felt like one person but with two character designs. They both work for evil agencies. they're both the best at what they do, they both have powers. But they felt like essentially the same person. It didn't help that I kept confusing their names - blue and red; it was not enough of a differentiator.
Also, almost every character was female or took the form of a woman. At first, I thought it was a world of women, which is fine, but this was not the case. I'm not sure what the reasoning behind this stylistic choice is, but I could not figure it out. This is more of a note than a criticism.
The scifi elements were easy enough to understand. There were nice metaphorical elements and thought experiments. They both touched each other's lives before their met. At times it was a bit disturbing. I don't know if I misunderstood this, but the tech one kissed the nature one when the nature one was still being grown, which is kinda gross.
Oh well.
I wanted to like this book so badly. I can get behind flowery language, I did like several of the letters, but everything in between made no sense. This was a no plot just vibes book but in a negative sense. There was no context to make me feel for the characters, understand the war, understand why the they in particular were in it. It just didn't hit for me, sad to say.
I've seen a few reviews critiquing the ‘flowery writing' and I unfortunately have to agree, a lot of big words strung together and it became tedious to read after awhile. I also had a really hard time understanding what was going on.
I wanted to like this one much more than I did. It did get better as time went on and I enjoyed the ending, but that doesn't undo my confusion for more than half the story nor the way it was written.
Was not expecting such a beautiful love story. I really enjoyed this listen especially enjoyed the two narrators made it easier to understand what was going on though not gonna lie felt lost the first half hour or so. I loved the story but it also left me wanting more to know more about this world they live in .
This is one of a kind and I get why people may think the plot is really smart, but I'm not sure it really did it for me. I didn't hate it but didn't love it either
You can't really world-build a high concept time travel war narrative using lyrical Sapphic free verse - who would have guessed?
To the extent this fails, it's due to great ambition. I highly recommend checking it out. It is unique - in the true sense of the word.
I think I'll let it all fade from my mind, and then revisit it, reading only the letters. I'm intrigued what effect that would have. My instinct is that it might be more alluring with LESS explanation. I feel like this tried to straddle lush poetry and intricate time travel plotting, and they didn't work so well together. My dissatisfaction with the plot I was given distracted me from just enjoying the language and emotion.
I also feel like the voices of the characters converged over time - weird, given the dual authorship, and disappointing because the characters are from such drastically different civilizations! Again, maybe a more patient re-read of their letters will give me a different impression.
All in all, highly weird and beautiful, and takes a big swing at being different.
I think this novella was a mistake in format. I would have enjoyed this much better in almost any other way. A full length novel could have really fleshed out the two characters and especially the world, which is felt was both focused on too heavily and also underdeveloped. A movie would probably be incredible, as would a miniseries. I even think if this was adapted into a graphic novel, I would love it.
But I thought it was a pretty poor novella. The writing style was nice but needlessly esoteric to the point where it was hard for me to visualize what was happening and how they got from point A to B in several instances. And the escalating “plot” just seems to kick in and be resolved and then have a twist all way too quickly. It just needed more room to breathe. It especially feels like a shame to build this whole conflict/time war/universe thing merely for this novella.
I'm sure this is a brilliant book, but it went over my head and I didn't connect with it.
I have never read a book quite like this and I don't think I ever will again. It felt like this entire story was filled to the brim with countless metaphors and ways of viewing this story. Every page felt like a poem, like the whole novel was one big poem. Or a love letter to love letters.
Usually, I really enjoy it when authors explain every detail of their world and how everything works. Here their was barely any explanation and thought I understood everything I needed too, I still feel confused about how this world is supposed to work. But the beauty of it is that it's so important because it really doesn't matter for the story. I read the whole thing in one day, what a wild ride.
One thing that did strike is that when reading the characters and the letters, Blue and Red did not have a very distinctive way of speaking, the letters could have been from the other person and I would not have been able to tell, which I found disappointing. But maybe that was the point? Honestly, thinking about this feels like interpreting a painting instead of reading a book. It was an absolutely unique experience I highly recommend.
The stakes of this book are so off! There is so little world building and there is a shallowness to the two characters' romance that can't be overcome by the flowery writing. I really wanted them to focus on the cool time travel history stuff, and why the two warring sides are actually different (as opposed to indistinct warring factions whose battles always just cancel each other out).
This is how you lose the Time War is not what you would call my usual kind of book. It's so far out of my comfort zone that it shouldn't have even been on my radar. But I read Max Gladstone's debut Three Parts Dead recently and completely fell in love with how unique a world it was. So, when I saw this latest novella collaboration by him and kept reading rave reviews about it, I just wanted to give it a try. I'm also trying to expand my reading into sci-fi, so I thought a shorter book would be the way to go. And wow did I make a great choice.
On first glance, I should hate this book. This is pure 100% purple prose. It's actually poetry masquerading as prose. I can't even say I understood all the sentences that were on the page. But even when I didn't exactly get the literal meaning, I could totally feel the emotion behind it all. This is probably what beautiful writing looks like - I was sitting in a bookstore reading this book and as it went on, I struggled so hard to choke back my tears. It's sublime and poignant and lyrical and utterly romantic. This is also not the kind of book you can race through - it requires patience and effort and really needs to be savored very slowly.
As you can glean from the title, the main part of the world building is time travel. The two main characters travel through strands of time, make changes that alter the courses of past and future, and leave each other letters through these strands. The epistolary format works perfectly to show us development of the relationship between the two MCs and as a huge fan of love letters in novels, I was totally charmed by them. The only world building we can be sure of is that there are two factions fighting a time war and our MCs are on opposite sides of the conflict - everything else is left vague and while that would usually put me off in any other book, I didn't mind it here at all. There was just enough for me to feel it, a sprinkling of foreshadowing to keep me going and an ending that comes together so perfectly that it made my heart soar.
To wrap it up, I just want to say that this book is unlike anything I've ever read. This is genre bending at its finest - it's a literary fiction novel with a time travel backdrop featuring a romance for the ages. If you like books that are unique and won't fit into any boxes, you should definitely give this one a try. This may be a little novella but it demands attention, and I implore you to give it its due and savor it. Don't try to understand it, just feel it. It just might surprise and capture your heart.
I read this book forever ago but was recently asked my thoughts on it, and after typing them up realized I'd basically written a goodreads review, so here's a cleaned up version:
I could honestly get over how terrible the prose of this book is, because it was originally a private project between two authors without intention to publish. That's fine. Sometimes you don't want to retool an entire novella stylistically when you do decide publish. Whatever.
But the book just doesn't work on a fundamental level. It's about love, but we never find out why the characters love each other except that they do, deeply. It's about war, but the cost of that war is never explored or felt. It's about time travel, but the time travel is only surface detail to paper over a plot hole.
The book's plot is horrible, in that nothing happens until the final quarter and then a single deus ex machina saves the day, something that was never hinted at or implied beforehand but is taken as given that this was one of the POV character's plans all along because time travel. It's basically 'because a wizard did it'.
I am not generally someone who throws around terms like ‘plot hole' and ‘deus ex machina' because in I truly believe that to enjoy fiction, you need to meet the writing where it's at; to a certain extent, saying a story is bad because it moves in a very recognizable shape is just refusing to engage with the text in good faith. But This is How You Lose the Time War gives you literally nothing. Every aspect of the book is different shades of distraction.
The prose is there to distract you from how thin the romance is, the romance is there to distract you from how thin the plot is, and the ‘plot' is there to justify the prose.
Which is all fine, it's a silly little collaboration novella that I happily read, was annoyed by for five minutes, and then got over it, except now it's fucking everywhere and I am once again the bitterest bitch at Costco.
I enjoyed this. It was a quick listen (about 4 hours). I'll admit I was very distracted at the end and so had to Google to understand what happened.
I was almost done with this (it's short anyway) but I just. do not care. love the idea, question the execution. My biggest problem was probably I found red and blue interchangeable in personality despite coming from wildly different timelines and almost being different species of humans.
my amoral rival lesbians who try to kill and/or kiss eachother across time and space of choice are still lambdabern
The absolute state of contemporary science fiction. A Goodreads book through and through.
This book was a treat. At first it was a bit confusing, with the scifi context being a bit loose and undefined, but the beauty of the literary language, really pulls you in.
I am not to one who reads epistolary romance but this one was a beautiful book about two individuals so far removed and at the same time so close in their nature that it was irresistible.
Tasteful and sensitive, with great style and elegant writing.