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A review by pushingdessy
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar
Did not finish book. Stopped at 52%.
If you throw a pot of honey at the wall, it might look artsy, but it's not going to make me fall in love.
That's how this book felt. A bunch of honeyed letters that were supposed to make me swoon over this enemies-to-lovers story, except none of it made any sense. These are time-travelling... robots? beings? Transformers? who are fighting a war over... who gets to change history...? for the purposes of... ??? They hate each other and are designed to kill each other because... I don't know? They begin to exchange letters because... reasons? and the letters are not your ol' ink and paper but... bird entrails? carvings on a rabbit's molar? sketches on a blade of grass?
Everything was unnecessarily confusing and underexplained. I could not find any substance under the flowery language wrapping. I could not give a single fuck for the characters or their love story. This is a sapphic love story and they're supposed to be women. But are they? There's no reason why they should have any gender at all. They come from completely different backgrounds yet talk the same, act the same, are able to transmute the same. They call each other increasingly pretentious names related to their designations (Red and Blue).
After seeing this book praised everywhere as this great sapphic love story, I wanted to at least finish hate-reading it, but I just couldn't bring myself to it. In just half of it there was plenty enough to read; not even skimming the text did it seem to go any faster. I only skipped to the last chapter out of curiosity, but nothing could have saved this book from the pit of hollow grandiloquence it dug itself into. Sorry if it makes you think I'm not intellectual enough, but this just ain't it for me.
That's how this book felt. A bunch of honeyed letters that were supposed to make me swoon over this enemies-to-lovers story, except none of it made any sense. These are time-travelling... robots? beings? Transformers? who are fighting a war over... who gets to change history...? for the purposes of... ??? They hate each other and are designed to kill each other because... I don't know? They begin to exchange letters because... reasons? and the letters are not your ol' ink and paper but... bird entrails? carvings on a rabbit's molar? sketches on a blade of grass?
Everything was unnecessarily confusing and underexplained. I could not find any substance under the flowery language wrapping. I could not give a single fuck for the characters or their love story. This is a sapphic love story and they're supposed to be women. But are they? There's no reason why they should have any gender at all. They come from completely different backgrounds yet talk the same, act the same, are able to transmute the same. They call each other increasingly pretentious names related to their designations (Red and Blue).
After seeing this book praised everywhere as this great sapphic love story, I wanted to at least finish hate-reading it, but I just couldn't bring myself to it. In just half of it there was plenty enough to read; not even skimming the text did it seem to go any faster. I only skipped to the last chapter out of curiosity, but nothing could have saved this book from the pit of hollow grandiloquence it dug itself into. Sorry if it makes you think I'm not intellectual enough, but this just ain't it for me.