User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
This Is How You Lose the Time War does not make it easy for any reviewer to describe the experience of reading it. As soon as you start to put words in, you hit a wall. How does one explain the action of the novel without surrendering any spoilers?
I can tell you that the first strand running through this loosely-braided narrative comes in the form of a letter. That the first of its kind is only pretend, an instant of self-indulgence, but that it began a circling of time for Red, the past cutting into the present like a whetted blade. Then comes the second letter, which is an abyss daring Red to fall inside despite the sense that she and Blue are all digging themselves deeper than ever before. By the third letter, Red feels that they are cutting their own throats by all of this.
Blue and Red, our protagonists, are two time traveling spies from rival factions in a time-war-ravaged world, who make contact and find love—and something that frightens them, too—across a void too profound to bridge with anything other than words. The two women are more real to each other than reflections in a mirror. They had borne witness to too many battles waged against time (and each other), but this time too many forces are ready to make siege weapons of their letters. Yet, in the sheer shimmering (im)possibility of every word, they can almost pretend they can get away with it.
And we’ll run again, the two of us, upthread and down, firefighter and fire starter, two predators only sated by each other’s words.
This novel is a lot; but in a good way.
This Is How You Lose the Time War is a book of sustained beauty and lyricism that also works as a fractured mosaic of a novel—told in swift, brutal strokes, all wound into vertiginous loops of prose. It is not what anyone would describe as a light read by any stretch. Rather it is the kind of novel that makes you pay attention and invites you to participate. If you're here,
This Is How You Lose the Time War seems to say, you have to be ready to
be here.
El-Mohtar and Maxwell are undeniably some of the greatest writers writing today. They are in full command of their narrative gifts, and together their language soars as they write of desire, longing, fear, survival and freedom. The result is prose that reads like an intricate dance, a dialogic push-and-pull as effortless and compelling as the protagonists' correspondence. There’s clearly a lot of trust here between the two authors, and the novel is all the better for it.
That said, those gifts can sometimes double as obstacles. As beautiful as the prose is,
This Is How You Lose the Time War is a novel that can feel both exhilarating and exhausting, sometimes simultaneously. There are moments when the lyricism feels labored, the sentences so bedecked with metaphors and analogies that one might crave a little more restraint sometimes. Inside the long economy of a novel, I think too much prose (no matter how exquisite) can occasionally hamper the flow of the narrative.
I learned, however, to read the novel in small merciful doses, lingering more over the words, extrapolating meaning from language, slowly stitching the errant pieces into a whole. Ultimately, this becomes the most rewarding experience of reading
This Is How You Lose the Time War: that this is a novel that teaches you how to read it, that offers its hand and invites you to relax into the chaos of it all. I’m already looking forward to reading it again.
Dearest, deepest Blue—
At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you.
Red
Rating: really liked it
i let a man i was seeing borrow my copy of this and then i ghosted the man and then i moved across the country and now i don't have the book and hardcover copies are so expensive.
in conclusion: i'm retiring from dating
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full reviewI do not know how to write five star reviews.
Give me a book I hate and I’ll write a full-on thesis on it. Prime example: Just yesterday I spent
one human hour on a seven-page one star rant review. And honestly? Time well spent.
But when it comes to something I truly love? I’m illiterate. Can’t read. Can’t write. Call me Jared, 19. What am I doing on this book site? Couldn’t tell you.
I WANT to scream about this from the rooftops. I want each and every one of you to read it, because it is utterly one of a kind and it’s gripping from page one and the characters are fantastic and the writing is witty and beautiful and it is…
I tried to trick myself into stating all the ways in which it is amazing, but as always I got overwhelmed and ran out of words to describe it. (The one scenario in known human existence that can get me to shut up for even one second.)
Anytime I write a five star review, I struggle to render perfection onto the page, and I just make myself want to reread.
Damn...I really, really want to reread.
Bottom line: Don’t take my insufficient words for it!!! But read this book immediately.
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rereading updatesshock of shocks: this book i reread 3 months after reading it for the first time is on my 2020 favorites list.
the list in question: https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.co...
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treating myself to some pure bliss & buddy rereading with lily
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pre-reviewwho the hell told this book it was allowed to end?
review to come / 5 stars
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currently-reading updateshow far into this book were you when you realized it was unlike anything you'd ever read or would read, and also you were in love with it?
for me it was page 14.
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tbr reviewi'm a simple girl. i hear sapphic time travel, i add to my tbr
Rating: really liked it
2ish stars.
What it comes down to is that I'm simply not enough of a romantic to enjoy this book. The appeal lies squarely in the flowery language written in love poems between two post-human women on opposite sides of a time travel war. I just happen to find love poetry more pretentious and mawkish than amorous or emotive. (Can it even really be considered romantic when one character addresses the other as "Dearest Blue-da-ba-dee?")
The rest of the book (characters, setting, plot) is left intentionally indistinct and much of it is epistolary in format, so I was left feeling detached and dispassionate. Not enough is described about the characters to identify with them or care much about them outside the context of their forbidden romance. Not enough of the world is described to care much about what's going on with the war itself. As the authors write, “Some things are more important than winning.” When you don't care much about who wins or loses anyway, the point becomes moot.
Posted in Mr. Philip's Library
Rating: really liked it
This is the most fun I’ve had reading this writing style in a while! It’s such a creative, abstract, lyrical, and well-written love story that not only did I re-listen to each chapter twice on audiobook, but I also ended up borrowing the ebook just so that I could digest the writing via my eyeballs. There were many sensory experiences and beautifully crafted letters. The cat-and-mouse game between the two female protagonists is fun to read and the intimacy that builds up between them just by the letters alone is a great ride. It is not a perfect book and sometimes it can feel repetitive or filler-like due to the repeated format, but I am more so impressed by the creativity of layering all these different time periods and how the writers clearly had fun putting this together, including the twist at the end.
Rating: really liked it
Holy shit this was good.
Rating: really liked it
Killing Eve but they are time traveling pen pals
Rating: really liked it
this book has some truly gorgeous words and the yearning between red and blue is on point, but sci fi and my brain are like oil and water & i was ✨confusion✨ for most of the story
Rating: really liked it
[2022]
(This was such a thoughtful gift from Melissa!)this was so perfect i had to reread it again.... and it was even more perfect the second time around. ❤
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Rating: really liked it
beautiful, amazing, so gorgeously written
THIS IS THE SAPPHIC CONTENT I LIVE FOR
Rating: really liked it
Almost all my Goodread friends are raving about this. I just didn't like it. I never really understood why the characters fell in love, there's no explanation about what is really going on with the two sides and the writing style was just too... "extra" for me. It's very literary and poetic, it's all words and not much substance. It just wasn't for me.
Rating: really liked it
‘
I want to be a context for you, and you for me.’
There is something uniquely affecting when love is painted against the backdrop of the limitlessness of space and time. The effect has been done many times over but nothing can prepare you for the extraordinary beauty in which
This is How You Lose the Time War allows you to experience love stretching out and weaving across time and dimensions to examine just how infinite it can possibly be. A spark of emotion that shines through galaxies reduced to dust, the countless rises and falls of mortal empires, the lifespans of all human feats and follies. Co-written by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, each writing one of the two protagonists, the novel is a soaring epistalatory sapphic romance between two rival time-traveling agents in a war between their respective societies to control and rewrite the multiverse in order to eradicate the other. Spawn by a private battlefield provocation, the two agents become caught in a maelstrom of self-discovery and romance corresponding by letters as they chase each other across time and space in a playful and imaginative novel so searingly beautiful the cosmos can barely contain it.
These two authors have created something charmingly original in Time War, enhanced by the distinct dueling voices of the authors as their prose communicates and responds to each other along with their characters. Many of these letters, particularly in the novel’s latter half, blossom into pure ethereal poetry. On occasion it dips into purple prose, as one letter admits, however, what a clever sentiment for a profession of love between characters named Red and Blue to evolve into purple. The writing remains crisp, rotating between short narration and the correspondence between the two, allowing the narrative to progress as strongly on wings of emotion as it does the chain of events. What transpires is often intentionally vague as no time is wasted on much exposition or explanation, but fully immerses you in a world you won’t quite grasp or understand. It’s as if this gorgeous landscape of the multiverse were simply a blur as you are focused on the interaction between Red and Blue, much the way the world around you fades from focus in the first moments of love.
Ultimately, any attempt at concreteness in a universe in a constant state of flux and revision would be beside the point, and the vagueness reflects that. It is only though the shared connection between Red and Blue that we can find a stable focal point as they pass through a kaleidoscope of time. Much like the way the pair gives context to one another, our only context is through them as well. They are each other’s only tether to stability in an unstable reality.
‘
When did it happen? Or has it always happened? Like your victory, love spreads back through time.’
Entire multi-dimensions are shifted, burned or woven together on the battlefield of time between Garden, an organic and collectivist society from which Blue has grown, and Agency, a post-singularity mechanical society that created Red. They are locked in an eternal time-war of which the specifics and origins of are rarely addressed and even then are quite vague. The novel makes reference to Romeo and Juliet in narrative and thematically (the play, it is said, has different endings in each strand of time), and shares it’s notion of a long-standing feud where all existing players have forgotten why but continue to play it out to the point of extreme violence. What they are doing exactly is a bit elusive but strands are altered by, say, helping a city build a port or ensuring a mathematical formula survives the destruction of Atlantis: little things that add up over centuries to create wholly different versions of reality that are fought over.
‘In the war they wage through time, what lasting advantage comes from murdering ghosts, who, with a slight shift of threads, will return to life or live different lives that never bright them to the executioner’s blade?...No death sticks but the one that matters.’
‘
What a microcosm we are of the war as a whole, you and I,’ Blue writes to Red early on, ‘
An action and an equal and opposite reaction.’ The two women--they identify as she/her and can take on human form though you’d be hard pressed to form a definite image of what they look like based on the various hints--who’s designation as Red and Blue help to impress an idea as mere players in a game, are equals of one another, rivals ever, which is the initial attraction between the them. ‘
They were separate, they did not speak, but each shaped the other, even as they were shaped in turn.’ What begins as a game of hunter and hunted in boasting and taunting letters quickly gives way to deep conversations about the self that makes them aware they have an agency beyond their respective Agencies and despite being weapons of war have a taste for the finer and beautiful things in life. In those moments they realize there is a hole inside them that only the other can fill. And as their love grows, they begin to wonder--partly due to the millenia of time they criss-cross during their budding attraction--if perhaps the love didn’t just arrive but had always been there. As with any sci-fi involving time travel, there is the inevitable paradox of events and free-will within a shifting reality and the two authors harness this paradox into their novel towards an exquisite and emotional end.
‘
There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there?’
‘
Letters are structures, not events,’ Red writes to Blue, ‘
Yours give me a place to live inside.’ This beautiful refuge from war they’ve found in their secret correspondence also becomes a commentary on language and communication itself. In whimsical sci-fi nature, they write in abstract languages found in reading the structure of leaves on a plant or decoding rings on a tree (just let it happen, it’s super cool), which reflects the way the tools of writing shape how we write--a topic often written upon by philosopher Jacques Derrida. Their secret letters envelope the secrecy of their relationship and dangers they face even reading letters from the enemy, which is fascinating to think of considering a digital age where communication can occur through images (entire conversations can be had with emojis and memes) or other non-alphabetic communication.
In our modern world we continue to embrace non-verbal communication that relationships can be built from, such as how with online dating many people exist only in messages to one another before meeting and form an attraction that way. It is a beautiful notion to consider how through just our words we can fall in love with the essence of another by showing an understanding, empathy and passion for the thoughts of each other (when I first met my partner we met in person only three times before she moved back to Ireland so for months we got to know each other through long late night texting and her sending me letters, so love across distance has always spoken to me pretty well). Messages written at one place in time, sent, and received in another transmitting emotions across time and space. ‘
Books are letters in bottles,’ one letter reads, ‘
cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.’ All books are love letters, if you think about it. One person sending out a message in hopes someone will understand and understand them in turn, an abstract connection that reaches even beyond the grave. There is a voyeuristic sense to this novel--reading their letters and all--but it reminds us of our primal instincts that desire connection and the fireworks of emotion that come from first contact with it. It is nearly impossible to not be swept up in their romance and feel their fears, pains, and needs standing naked and unafraid before one another, like a tree in winter unashamed of it’s gnarled limbs.
‘
Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down.’
There is a subtle shadow of dread cast across their saga keeping the reader keenly aware that their taboo relationship is always threatened by the larger world in which they exist. Agency traces Blue’s exploits and wishes to set a trap for her, one Red will be used to ensure the success of the mission. Betrayal exists in the peripheries of this novel at all times, especially when they begin to open up hoping this isn’t just some long con. Poison is an important theme throughout the novel, with the women taunting each other that any letter could be laced with it and choosing to read forward anyways. It reminds us of how we remove our armor and open ourselves up to pain when we choose to love. War begets death and suffering, and the two players have entered into this affair knowing the risks but plunging on ahead regardless.
‘
I want to meet you in every place I have loved.’
It is difficult to say much more without spoiling anything in this clever plotted novel. It is one that encourages an immediate reread, as clues and puzzle pieces are weaved into the novel much like the way our heroines weave space and time together for their purposes. It is an extraordinary little book that somehow manages to never feel like a gimmick despite it’s inventive and quirky nature. Time, place, love, and war all become a potent concoction for one of the most tender and vulnerable romances I’ve ever read. I could praise it all day long but, as is written in one of the cosmic letters, ‘
I am the songbird running out of air, and I must breathe.’
4.5/5‘
I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.’
Rating: really liked it
A book about communication (both between the characters and the two authors of the novel), as well as yearning and betrayal. Its lyrical prose is mesmerising as it drip-feeds information to the reader.
It's definitely a book of two halves, in that the first 70-ish pages don't really make any sense while you're first reading them. You really have to work through a lot of complicated sci-fi world-building to (eventually) appreciate the plot's mighty crescendo, which is very spectacular. Mixed feelings for this book which is simultaneously thrilling and exhausting.
Rating: really liked it
Congratulations to the 2020 Hugo winner for best novella!
But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me.
I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.
This Is How You Lose the Time War is about two women, Red and Blue, on opposite sides of a time war, as they fall in love with each other via love letters. It… was a lot to process. This is more poetry than book, and I think maybe in another timeline, another time in my life, that would have annoyed me. In this case, I adored it.
This is a novel about time that does not try to ground itself or stick to a place and a setting. Gladstone and El-Mohtar stick to flurid details of this world: Red’s technology-centric future, and Blue’s natural paradise. The chaotic details surround the reader from the start: the rise and fall of multiple Atlantises, the sheer amount of the timestream, and—the biggest threat—the sheer unwinnability of the war. Rather, it sticks to a love story, to the simpleness of caring.
What does it actually mean to hunger as a crafted, manufactured creature? What does it mean to love as such? What does it mean when to desire is painful, and has consequences for both you and the other person?
The letters are the standout, the flying colors of the novel. There is something very profound about this Romeo-Juliet esque love story, one neither of them have a chance at surviving from the start. Communicating is an act of bravery and it is through these acts of bravery that they fall in love. I went trawling through Wikipedia and found out this about the letters:
..."Red's letters were written entirely by Gladstone, and Blue's by El-Mohtar; although they wrote a general outline beforehand, "the reactions of each character were developed with a genuine element of surprise on receiving each letter, and the scenes accompanying [the letters] were written using that emotional response"."
Don’t let all the doom fool you, though; this is by no means a sad book. The story of Red and Blue falling in love through time is one that I spent more time smiling at than crying at. I loved getting to know these characters. I hungered to know them more.
I want to meet you in every place I have loved.
If you like:
🌿Time travel, or time travel wars
🌿Tender sapphic romance
🌿Thinking about the innate pain and humiliation of desire
🌿Very very gorgeous writing
🌿Crying. i wish i were kidding i cried so much it was kind of bad
...then I think you will like this book.
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Rating: really liked it
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This is How You Lose The Time War focuses on two time travelers, Blue and Red. These two women work for agencies who want to bend time to their will. While on a mission, Red finds a message, “Burn before Reading.” This sparks a series of correspondence, hidden messages, between the two time travelers. How will this friendship between these two sworn enemies end?
Tons of people just love this book, but I couldn’t get into it. My attention kept wandering off. This review is my attempt to pinpoint what went wrong.
First, this book involves time travel, and it is underwhelming. Part of this is due to the narrator who seems to be quite detached. The death and destruction are just another day at the office. However, the detachment did not build suspense. I practiced immersion reading in this book, and even the audiobook narrators seemed very bored and detached. If I could go back, I think I would have been better served if I read this book without the audiobook.
Second, when you think back through history, there are a few moments in time that would likely have changed history: the invention of indoor plumbing, electricity, computers, mobile phones, the internet, the forming of nations. Wouldn’t it be interesting to tag along and see these events unfold? You will not find these events in this book though.
It is also interesting to think of events in time, because even if you stopped them, are they inevitable? For example, if Netflix didn’t exist, Hulu would probably still pop up. If you stopped the invention of electricity, would it just be invented a few years later?
This is How You Lose The Time War is not completely horrible. It discusses interesting topics and does have some unique features.
“There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there?” This quote really got me thinking. Letters are time traveling. For example, when I write a letter and stick it in an envelope, and someone reads it ten years later, my thoughts are traveling through time. When I write the letter, I will have no idea the condition of the reader or the social, economic, political, or technological landscape. A problem that I have today might be irrelevant in the future. It is a very interesting concept, time traveling by letter.
The most interesting thing about this book is the way that Red and Blue communicate. They communicate using a different medium every time. They understand each other.
Please note that the text copy on Scribd of This is How You Lose The Time War does not seem to be very accurate. When I was listening to the audiobook, I noticed that the book had prophet when the word was poet. The text also had something about a Trojan hoarse.
Overall, This is How You Lose The Time War is an average fantasy novel with underwhelming time travel elements.
2022 Reading Schedule
Jan Animal Farm
Feb Lord of the Flies
Mar The Da Vinci Code
Apr Of Mice and Men
May Memoirs of a Geisha
Jun Little Women
Jul The Lovely Bones
Aug Charlotte's Web
Sep Life of Pi
Oct Dracula
Nov Gone with the Wind
Dec The Secret Garden
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Rating: really liked it
This book made me feel really dumb. I don't think it was the book's fault. The combination of high science fiction with poetic literary fiction just didn't click together in my brain. There was never a point in this book where I knew what was going on. I just finished it and have no idea what happened in it.
