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

adventurous challenging emotional mysterious medium-paced

5.0

To be honest, I had no idea what was going on for the first half of this book. The world-building just throws you right into the deep-end and never really explains anything. It was actually kind of fun just figuring things out as the story moved along, almost like a mystery. The prose was so lyrical and poetic. The picture it paints of the scenery, of Blue and Red and their infinite love was just... sublime. 

I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in 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. 

At heart, this was a breathtaking epistolary love story set in some futuristic time-travelling version of earth. These heroines live out entire lifetimes just to leave each other a single letter. I hesitate to call it a romance, because there isn’t a HEA as such, but the ending is optimistic. 

I was surprised that Red and Blue had such similar writing styles; given how Red was depicted, I expected a much more ascetic style of prose from her. But then we wouldn’t have had some of the gorgeous lines we got in here, so I can’t complain. 

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