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mayab1226 's review for:
This Is How You Lose the Time War
by Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar
challenging
emotional
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
God…I’M EMOTIONALLY COMPROMISED.
This wasn’t the kind of book I could idly flip through at a train station—it took mental & emotional investment to parse out El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s flowery language and puzzle out the world they’d built. It took me a while to understand the Agency, the Garden, and how the Time War worked. In fact, in my opinion, it warrants at least a reread or two. But the investment I put in was so worth it—Red & Blue’s growing romance and feelings for each other, their increasing desperation, absolutely pulled me into the world of the novel and, by the end, had sent me on a full-on emotional roller coaster.
The authors weave language beautifully to show the ravages of the Time War (without disclosing too many specifics—this is much more literary than hard sci-fi) and how two agents on opposing sides of the war from backgrounds that couldn’t be more different—Red, a technologically-enhanced not-quite-human working for a collective Agency; Blue, the growth of a Garden whose workers implant themselves seamlessly into the braids of Time— satiate their hunger for connection in an uncaring universe through each other. Red and Blue’s voices and respective backgrounds are just different enough to make them unique (although I’ll admit I often had to remind myself who was narrating/writing when I began the book), but just similar enough to show how the two of them are really more alike than they are different.
As one review pointed out, I also liked how this book subtly set up a female-centric world: the ways in which Red & Blue occupy gender are many and complex, but both are referred to as she/her, and as the book progresses, nearly everyone/everything else is as well: the Commandant, the Garden, even—at one point—the concept of God Herself. It was refreshing to see, and a fantastic subversion of patriarchal, heteronormative ideals (if you’ll allow me to get liberal-college-student jargon-y for a moment).
Like The Night Circus, I predict that the parts of this book that will stick with me won’t be the plot or details of its worldbuilding so much as the feeling—a vague memory of beautiful, evocative prose and many, many emotions.
This wasn’t the kind of book I could idly flip through at a train station—it took mental & emotional investment to parse out El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s flowery language and puzzle out the world they’d built. It took me a while to understand the Agency, the Garden, and how the Time War worked. In fact, in my opinion, it warrants at least a reread or two. But the investment I put in was so worth it—Red & Blue’s growing romance and feelings for each other, their increasing desperation, absolutely pulled me into the world of the novel and, by the end, had sent me on a full-on emotional roller coaster.
The authors weave language beautifully to show the ravages of the Time War (without disclosing too many specifics—this is much more literary than hard sci-fi) and how two agents on opposing sides of the war from backgrounds that couldn’t be more different—Red, a technologically-enhanced not-quite-human working for a collective Agency; Blue, the growth of a Garden whose workers implant themselves seamlessly into the braids of Time— satiate their hunger for connection in an uncaring universe through each other. Red and Blue’s voices and respective backgrounds are just different enough to make them unique (although I’ll admit I often had to remind myself who was narrating/writing when I began the book), but just similar enough to show how the two of them are really more alike than they are different.
As one review pointed out, I also liked how this book subtly set up a female-centric world: the ways in which Red & Blue occupy gender are many and complex, but both are referred to as she/her, and as the book progresses, nearly everyone/everything else is as well: the Commandant, the Garden, even—at one point—the concept of God Herself. It was refreshing to see, and a fantastic subversion of patriarchal, heteronormative ideals (if you’ll allow me to get liberal-college-student jargon-y for a moment).
Like The Night Circus, I predict that the parts of this book that will stick with me won’t be the plot or details of its worldbuilding so much as the feeling—a vague memory of beautiful, evocative prose and many, many emotions.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, War
Moderate: Genocide, Blood