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A review by peppypenguin
This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar
emotional
hopeful
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
Beautiful writing and storytelling. It feels like a fever dream: you have a sense of the key concepts and how the characters and their relationship are developing. I could not, for my life, visualize the time-traveling and how it worked. That’s okay because the mechanics of the time traveling for each character and their factions serve more as a way to distinguish how they move about space and time and interact with the universe. It also forced me to take my time and digest the words on the page, and in turn the story.
This is great as a novella. Because there is so much poetic prose it helps to have the story told in fewer pages, making it move a bit faster.
The letters between the characters are very well planned. You get a sense of their voices, understand their worlds, and watch their relationship bloom. They feel so real, and have so much depth, and seeing how they fall for each other and leave messages across time, as well as how their paths cross throughout the story is fantastically done.
As a lover of science fiction, this hit the right spot. The time traveling and manipulation of events as it’s done by each side was really interesting! The two sides of the war (the different futures fighting to win) are really unique and so vastly different. I love how they are explained just enough to have real depth and thought put into them.
Red and Blue are wonderful characters. You never learn their real names, but that’s the point. They are opposite sides of the same coin, and to see how they start as pure enemies but eventually come together is beautiful. The genre and unique world of the book is used as a tool, masterfully so, to tell their story.
Lovers of romance and/or science fiction should give this a go.
This is great as a novella. Because there is so much poetic prose it helps to have the story told in fewer pages, making it move a bit faster.
The letters between the characters are very well planned. You get a sense of their voices, understand their worlds, and watch their relationship bloom. They feel so real, and have so much depth, and seeing how they fall for each other and leave messages across time, as well as how their paths cross throughout the story is fantastically done.
As a lover of science fiction, this hit the right spot. The time traveling and manipulation of events as it’s done by each side was really interesting! The two sides of the war (the different futures fighting to win) are really unique and so vastly different. I love how they are explained just enough to have real depth and thought put into them.
Red and Blue are wonderful characters. You never learn their real names, but that’s the point. They are opposite sides of the same coin, and to see how they start as pure enemies but eventually come together is beautiful. The genre and unique world of the book is used as a tool, masterfully so, to tell their story.
Lovers of romance and/or science fiction should give this a go.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Animal death, Death, Genocide, Gore, Incest, Self harm, Violence, Blood, Murder, War, and Injury/Injury detail
Minor: Torture