Reviews with content warning for Death - This Is How You Lose the Time War

Reviews tagging 'Death'

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar

441 reviews

kajoreads's review against another edition

emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

It took me a while to get emotionally invested, which isn’t ideal when the book is only 200 pages long.

The last third was worth the wait though.

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saskiahill's review against another edition

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medium-paced

4.0

If you can, read in one or two sittings as the writing flows and it's not the easiest to keep track of.

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24carrotgay's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

i would give this book 10 stars if i could!! it is hands-down the most beautiful story i have ever heard. i am in awe of how the story was so beautifully woven (pun intended) together. the love between red and blue is palpable. it is so deep and so vast that my arms get goosebumps and my eyes threaten to cry. i am left speechless. this book is everything. it will forever be one of my favorites.

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angelofthetardis's review

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challenging emotional fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

In an endless war to control time, what starts as a taunting exchange of letters between two rival warriors develops into a lasting bond between the pair. But battle still rages, and consorting with the enemy could have dire consequences if discovered. So what's more important; winning the war, or each other?

I have to say that this is a beautifully written piece; the imagery it invokes is wonderfully powerful, and the feelings of the characters as they develop soar from the page. You are immediately pulled into the story and kept there, and while you might try to anticipate the story as it progresses, the authors have done a fab job at keeping the reader guessing. For such a short book, it packs a powerful punch!

However, while this has lots of elements that should make it slot perfectly into my wheelhouse (time travel, enemies-to-lovers etc etc), I'm finding it very difficult to place, I think because the writing style is so very different to what I would usually enjoy. There is practically no context to the wider events, and little in the way of worldbuilding to allow you to understand the mechanics of the roles the characters are playing and the sides they are on. As a result, it reads more like a series of vignettes than a strong 'linear' narrative, with the authors describing how the characters receive each letter (in various weird and wonderful ways) before revealling the content. But it feels like there are just too many unknowns or unanswered questions about who they are, what they're doing and how they got there.

I will admit that a very small part of me sees the characters as The Doctor and The Master - hey, if you mention the Time War, my brain is on a one way trip to Doctor Who land! But in an odd way this helped me grasp the basis of Red and Blue's story better, I suppose because I could then contextualise the characters and their relationship. It's by no means a perfect fit, but enough seemed to resonate that it helped. Again, there are so many unknowns about the characters for me.

I could see this making a beautiful one-off TV series, or even an anime series, as the visuals from the page scream to be brought to life. I definitely enjoyed reading it, but not quite as much as I'd hoped.

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leweylibrary's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I'm not sure if I was *quite* in the best headspace for this book, but gosh there were still a lot of things I loved, and I could still tell it was lovely and beautiful. I mean, just look how many quotes I liked lol. I really liked the letters, they were by far the best part. I also just wanted more, but that's the tradeoff with books like this that are more like novellas.

Quotes:

A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet. (3)
The planet waits for its end. Vines live, yes, and crickets, though no one's left to see them but the skulls. (5)
Not every battle's grand, not every weapon fierce. Even we who fight wars through time forget the value of a word at the right moment, a rattle in the right car engine, a nail in the right horseshoe... It's so easy to crush a planet that you may overlook the value of a whisper to a snowbank. (13)
Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere. (39)
London Next--the same day, month, year, but one strand over-- is the kind of London other Londons dream: CPA tented, sky's strung with durigibles, the viciousness of empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop glow redolent of spice and peddled sugar. Mannered as a novel, filthy only wear story requires it, all meat pies and monarchy-- this is a place Blue loves, and hates herself for loving. (55)
I look at you, Red, and see much of myself: a desire to be apart, sometimes, to understand who I am without the rest. And what I return to, the me-ness that I know as pure, inescapable self...is hunger. Desire. Longing, this longing to possess, to become, to break like a wave on a rock and reform, and break again, and wash away. This is a necessary part of any ecosystem, but it unsettles others, this inability to be satisfied. It is difficult-- it is very difficult, to befriend where you wish to consume, to find those who, when they ask ( i Do I have you still, ( when they end a letter with ( i Yours, (mean it in any substantive way. (72)
So in this letter I am yours. Not Garden's, not your mission's, but yours, alone.
I am yours and other ways as well: yours as I watch the world for your signs, apophenic as a haruspex; yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery; yours as I review your words by their sequence, their sound, smell, taste, taking care no one memory of them becomes too worn. Yours. Still, I suspect you will appreciate the token. (83)
There is a small hill from which I can watch the sun set over the Outaouais River; every evening I see a red sky bleed over blue water and think of us. Have you ever watched this kind of sunset? The colours don't blend: the red or the sky, the blue or the water, as we tilt away from the sun. (88)
You wrote of being in a village upthread together, living as friends and neighbours do, and I could have swallowed this valley hole and still not have sated my hunger for the thought. Instead, I wick the longing into thread, pass it through your needle eye, and sew it into hiding somewhere beneath my skin, embroider my next letter to you one stitch at a time. (105)
All good stories travel from the outside in. (119)
It's not that I never noticed before how many red things there are in the world. It's that they were never any more relevant to me than green or white or gold. Now it's as if the whole world sings to me in petals, feathers, pebbles, blood. Not that it didn't before--Garden loves music with a depth impossible to sound--but now its song's for me alone. (120)
So Garden deployed me, made much of me, praised and elevated me, but always at something like arm's length.
My eccentricities are tolerated: my love of cities, of poetry, my appreciation for being rootless, for being, in some ways, more Gardener than Garden, or Gardened. My appetites, that being flooded with Garden can't seem to sate.
You, though, Red-- (124)
But I trust you.Take these years of mine, needs, and let them grow me something similar and reply? I miss the length of your letters. (125)
I love you, Blue.
Have I always? Haven't I?
When did it happen? Or has it always happened ? Like your victory, love spreads back through time. It claims are earliest association, our battles and losses. Assassinations become assignations. There was, I am sure, a time I did not know you. Or did I dream that me, as if so often dreamed of you? Have we always fulfilled one another in the chase? ( 129)
I want to be a body for you .
I want to chase you, find you, I want to be alluded 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 it's black hole binary interconjunction. I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement and a single breath, all the ages we've shaped together. (129-130)
I salt loneliness when I was young. You've seen me there: on my promontory, patient and unaware.
But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and four. 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. (130-131)
Viewed from sufficient height, all problems are simple. All knots can be untied with a few deaths, or ten thousand. (133)
I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in the waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you. (150)
At the end and at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you. (165)
You remember, I promised you infiltration from my very first letter-- dared you to be infected by me. I couldn't know, then-- I couldn't, and nor could you-- how thoroughly you were already inside me, shielding me from the future. You've always been the hunger at the heart of me, Red -- my teeth, my claws, my poisoned apple. Under the spreading chestnut tree, I made you and you made me. (197)
Finally, deer reader, we dedicate this one to you, and we mean it. Books are letters and bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.
Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep fighting. We're all still here. (200)