This Is How You Lose the Time War
Ratings1,133
Average rating3.9
Genuinely better than I hoped it could be after the initial hype. The last quarter of the book had me reeling.
This is How You Lose the Time War is a beautiful sci-fi dystopian sapphic love story. Epistles blooming between bits of narrative; Red and Blue, somewhat reminiscent of the time travelers in Umbrella Academy, travel up and down the threads of time to bring the future of their allegiance to fruition. Yet what they truly find is something totally unexpected. It's really a delightful story composed in majestic prose. If I have a critique, it is that the way information was revealed made some elements of the world building feel a bit vague or undefined, but this does not significantly detract from the book.
I have never read anything like this. Densely and poetically written abstract sci-fi romance. So good and short that I listened to the audiobook a second time as soon as I finished it!
Ik had geen connectie met de karakters. Wel een mooi liefdesverhaal, maar het was gewoon niet voor mij
The prose feels...excessive? I had to read at a snails pace to make it through, though it never felt like a slog. Five stars because of how often I found myself smiling.
Beautiful but a little confusing - world built as you go along but the wider context was slow, and felt lost quite a lot. But the development and the love story was beautiful.
I was happily surprised by this novella. I tend to lean more towards fantasy than sci-fi, I typically avoid time travel themes, and I don’t read much poetic/prose-y writing these days, but this was **very** well done.
I found some of the pain points others criticized online, e.g. the intentional lack of thorough world building, to be really refreshing and honestly more suitable to the story (and kinda the point?). Overall, this was a lovely read.
Conceptually, this is marvelous and the use of language is impressive. But there's little to sink your teeth into character-wise and I struggled to connect with the story emotionally. Still, an interesting book and I do not resent the time I spent reading it.
Quite moved by how much I liked this book. The best I can do is pick up a few lines from it and write some wounded memories around them.
“It is difficult–it is very difficult, to befriend where you wish to consume, to find those who, when they ask Do I have you still, when they end a letter with Yours, mean it in any substantive way.”
As the all-time King of reading too much into words and writing too much into them too deeply, I found this so moving to read. It speaks to the yearning that starts to grow in you when you see their face and think of their voice, and you hang on to everything they say, hoping for some sign, but not trusting yourself enough not to invent it (“I am so good at missing things. At making myself not see.”). How to keep love on a shallow level without drowning yourself to go deeper?
“Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.”
A place to live inside. Someone once told me they'd written me a letter about what I meant to them as a friend and a person. Months later we were at a crossroads and missed each other, and they said they would mail it. Some months later, on my last gray morning in Chicago, the very last thing I did when all my possessions were packed into an SUV, and my cat sat in its front seat, I checked my mailbox. It was heartbreaking never to receive it, and to wonder about meaning so little on that long drive across the country. Unmoored.
“I hope you can forgive this. To be soft, for me, is so often pretense, and pretense does not come easily while writing to you.”
I loved the anxiety manifesting through the characters being nervous about their writing - and talking about their nervousness in their writing. How many hours have we all spent staring at half-written e-mails, texts? How many to regret what's written and left unwritten?
“But when I think of you, I want to be alone together.”
Just beautiful.
PS: I have some G Lalo paper that the authors cite in the Acknowledgements and can attest that it's lovely to write on. Personally, I prefer Original Crown Mill's Pure Cotton paper, and if you ever get a letter from me, that's probably what it's written on <3.
Has a rocky start and picks up decently at the halfway point until the end, where it fizzles back out.
The writing is sometimes poetic, mostly flowery, but overall does well to distract away from the flaws of time travel narratives (and from the fact that you have no empathy for these characters). Some parts are actively bad and really cringe—you can almost feel how active on 2009 tumblr the authors were.
So let me put this first: I would have liked it more if I wasn't that stupid.
For me it was completely enjoyable based on the vibes alone. At first I thought the writing was tacky, but it grew on me. With each page I understood more and more of what to expect, which made it easier to enjoy the prose as I went along.
But you know what I couldn't comprehend better after each page: the world building. And with it, the plot.
I didn't have the slightest clue of what was going on. If I would have dissected each line piece by piece and thought about each new information given - then maybe, just mayyybe I wouldn't have understood everything. But I am not in school anymore, you will not see me doing this ever. (Except for Brandy Sandy maybe.)
BUT let me tell you: When I watched this 2min TikTok explaining the plot, the penny dropped. And it dropped HARD.
It was so obvious in hindsight. And by god did it enhance my thoughts about this book.
So yeah, read it. Maybe if you're halfway through and don't have a clue: Firstly, welcome to the club. Secondly, just read the tiniest bit of information about the setting and you'll be fine. Or ask me, I'll be glad to help you out.
Or should I say “GLADstone” to help you out? (Yes, I hate myself as well.)
I don't think I can pick just one quote from this book and put it at the top of my review as the whole novella is next to poetry. After my first read of this (and there will be more), I can say it is one of my favorite books I've read.
The sci-fi aspects of this book that were touched upon were explained just enough to make sense and leave the rest to the imagination. The romance of the book felt exactly the same as well. This felt like a modern day Shakespeare story and there were so many lines that I read and then re-read because of how profound it felt.
An easy 5 star read!
This was one of the best books that I've ever read. The way it was written, the two characters and their chemistry with each other, it just seemed very magical. At the same time, it upheld that level of mystery and made you want to continue reading to see what would happen. The reason why I docked off .5 was absolutely a me thing - the flowery prose and vocab used were on a higher level than I am typically used to. The beginning was incredibly hard to read and understand, and I'm absolutely grateful that I read on a kindle, considering how many words I had to check the definition for.
This book was definitely out of my comfort zone for that reason along with it being one of those books that you might need to reread to fully grasp the story. Otherwise, this book was beautifully written. I find that letter writing is so intimate and incredibly sentimental, along with being almost sapphic-coded.
I think my favorite part of this book was getting to the stories, seeing the fondness of the two characters grow into something more. I definitely wasn't expecting the last part of the book, having Red witness Blue's dead body and in turn begin to gather pieces of Blue just to bring her back and ensure both of their futures. The moment the texts began to match almost verbatim what was written at the beginning of the book, everything began to click for me and I was even more excited upon figuring out things for myself before I continued reading. I even looked up other's thoughts on the book and plot explanations. Its safe to say that I was even more in love with this book right after. I'm definitely going to reread this again later and continue looking up what other people thought of the story and get their own interpretations as well!
I want more books like this.
I bought this about when it came out, but never got around to reading it. Possibly because time travel isn't my favourite.
Then a few weeks ago there was a to do about the book on Twitter, and since I was waiting for a book from the library, and this is short, I decided to give it a go.
It's really good, and beautifully written!
What the hell was that ending?! I had to listen to the last few chapters twice and then Google “ending explained”
i had a good time!!!! i love the lil worlds and the romance was p sweet – letters are so sick damn
This is How You Lose the Time War is a Novella that is unique in the SF genre, it puts romance and prose ahead of all other elements, and it manages to deliver a compelling narrative with minimal world-building and hardly any emphasis on plot. It's fair to say that most SF works place their priorities in exactly the opposite configuration, so to call this book intriguing is an understatement to be sure.
To frame the premise, this is a queer-enemies-to-lovers story centering on two spies/agents on opposing sides of a war across time. Is there a little bit of the ol' “tick-the-boxes- this is Steven in marketing and he's going to help you sell this puppy,” razzle dazzle? Yes. Is the Novella content to let its premise dictate the direction of its narrative and structure? No way. The story is delivered through alternating passages, ingenious love letters from Red to Blue, and vice versa, each crammed full of literary reference and prosodic suggestion. If there were ever a novella that needed an annotated edition it's this one. I think that for each hour I spent reading a chapter I spent another hour looking things up, especially for some of the more literary references. Allusion rife abounds, and it's a double-edged sword- if much of the meaning is caught up in allusion and reference to other works, then the books run the chance of having that meaning lost. Thankfully despite how much reference is crammed into each letter, the sentiment and narrative manage to punch through.
When I first picked this novella up, I ripped through the first quarter like it was a white powdery substance and I was Carrie Fisher. I was immediately impressed by the presentation and the language, and I was excited to see where and how the plot would develop alongside the romance. I guess I didn't know what I was in for, because the further I went the less engaging I found it to be. This book subverted my expectations, where I thought I was getting Terminator meets The Lake House, what I actually got was Jane Austen writing Primer, and I thought Jane Eyre was a snooze fest best relegated to the back halls of the Library of Congress. That's not to say I didn't enjoy the story; for as little experience as I have with the romance genre, even I could appreciate how carefully crafted and beautiful each missive between agents is. But this isn't just a romance novel, it's Romance, it's poetry.
Never has a story transported me back to my collegiate writing seminars quite like this one, the more I read, the more I thought to myself, “This would totally kill in a workshop.” That's a backhanded compliment; I won't go so far as to say that this book is all style and no substance because it is substantial, it's just not my cup of tea. This book read to me like a collegiate exercise, a Capstone publication, impressive and exquisite for sure, but lacking in the pulpy flavor I crave from my SF. If I'd wanted to read Dickens, I'd have read Dickens, if I'd wanted to read Austen, I'd have read Austen, and if I want to read a book about the Time War well maybe it should BE about the Time War. Jake Brookins' review put it best,
“even if SF stories don't follow their worlds' particular Chosen Ones, it's customary to fill the reader in on the larger picture—at least beyond short story lengths. So, it's startling, for those used to at least a strong whiff of monomyth and systematic subcreation, to spend so much time with characters losing interest in the war, and a narrative that seeks to escape rather than explain its world.”
The first time I started reading this I didn't really care for it, I thought the prose was beautiful, but it wasn't enough to keep me interested and I dropped it for several months. Yesterday I picked the audiobook and listened to it from the beginning and I finally understand the hype around it.
As I said the writing here is really beautiful, the work is really well crafted and the romance is delightful in its yearning. And I think it really accomplishes what it sets out to. It's a love story told in letters, and the time travel part of it is good in a way that leaves you itching for more in-depth descriptions. I did see the twist coming and was thrilled by it.
WOW
I recognise that many of my reviews have been starting similarly lately but I truly don't think there is a better way to describe this book than the word wow.
I can't fathom that this was written by two different authors because the way each chapter and each sentence flowed together felt so connected and beautifully entwined. This felt like poetry to me. I don't think I have ever read anything like this and I'm not sure I ever will again.
Wow and beautiful will have to be the only words I can repeat when it comes to this book because I don't want to give too much away but what I will say is that this is a perfect read and i highly recommend it to anyone who comes across this review.
Also, the fact that this is sapphic?
Wow. Beautiful.