This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Synopsis
"Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.
Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.
Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war. That’s how war works. Right?"
My Thoughts
This Is How You Lose the Time War was not at all what I expected, but it was oh so wonderful anyway. Told through letters from opposing time agents to each other, this book manages to tell a weird and surreal love story that blossoms between the two characters, Red & Blue. Each letter is pieced together from pieces you'd never expect to find a letter on, which is just part of the strangeness. The language is entrancing and sometimes creepy.
Red & Blue are opposing time agents that over the course of letters exchanged, fall deeply in love with one another. I would say that the science fiction part of this took a backseat to the love story in this one. I listened to the audiobook of this one, and it was absolutely amazing to hear the narrators embody these words.
“Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.”
― Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War
This book was absolutely wonderful and bizarre simultaneously. The ending wasn't completely resolved, but that kind of made sense for the story.
Genre: sci-fi, romance, lgbtqia+
Representation: lesbian/queer
Content Warnings: torture, gore, mention of rape and suicide