This Is How You Lose the Time War

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.