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A review by incipientdreamer
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar
5.0
Dearest, deepest Blue—
At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you.
Red.
This was a very different book. It's not like anything I've read before. It's like Killing Eve meets Romeo and Juliet, but way queerer and better. While it's primarily a love story between two rival Time Agents, the concept of time travel was pretty important to the book. At times the writing and the metaphors were a bit hard to understand. The writing tended on being too convoluted. The imagery, however, is breathtaking and some passages of the book were beautiful.
This is the kind of book you can't rush through, it's best enjoyed slowly, savoring each word, and by really immersing yourself with the characters.
I loved the ingenuity with which the letters were spread through time and space; from tree rings to bee stings, to tea leaves, the writers were creative in constructing how Blue and Red received each other's letters. To fully appreciate this book, you need a big imagination and a sensitivity for the abstract. It's lyrical and poetic, verging on verse rather than prose, in terms of how the plot and the action unfolds.
If I were to compare this book to a painting, it would be a violent flash of colors, slashing across the canvas. Upon the first look, it may not seem more than obscure brushstrokes, but the longer you stare at it, the more depth you find. After scrutinizing it for hours, you might gain a substantial but dreamlike romance full of angst and love.
At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you.
Red.
This was a very different book. It's not like anything I've read before. It's like Killing Eve meets Romeo and Juliet, but way queerer and better. While it's primarily a love story between two rival Time Agents, the concept of time travel was pretty important to the book. At times the writing and the metaphors were a bit hard to understand. The writing tended on being too convoluted. The imagery, however, is breathtaking and some passages of the book were beautiful.
"I am yours in 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."
This is the kind of book you can't rush through, it's best enjoyed slowly, savoring each word, and by really immersing yourself with the characters.
"I want flowers from Cephalus and diamonds from Neptune, and I want to scorch the thousand earths between us to see what blooms from the ash, so we can discover it hand in hand, content in context, intelligible only to each other. I want to meet you in every place I have loved."
I loved the ingenuity with which the letters were spread through time and space; from tree rings to bee stings, to tea leaves, the writers were creative in constructing how Blue and Red received each other's letters. To fully appreciate this book, you need a big imagination and a sensitivity for the abstract. It's lyrical and poetic, verging on verse rather than prose, in terms of how the plot and the action unfolds.
"I send you this letter on a falling star. Reentry will score and test it but will not melt it away. I write in fire across the sky, a plummet to match your rise."
If I were to compare this book to a painting, it would be a violent flash of colors, slashing across the canvas. Upon the first look, it may not seem more than obscure brushstrokes, but the longer you stare at it, the more depth you find. After scrutinizing it for hours, you might gain a substantial but dreamlike romance full of angst and love.
"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."