After giving This is How You Lose the Time War a five star review, I started scrolling through other reviews and I found thoughtful, well reasoned arguments for the other side. This is a thoroughly crafted well written book that is not going to be to everyone’s taste.
The premise is two opposing secret agents, saboteurs, time and history manipulators who work for conflicting civilizations become aware of each other and start to exchange letters. It becomes a love story.
The nature of the work each main character does to manipulate history across many centuries and many parallel universes makes the narrative confusing. I can’t imagine it done effectively any other way, but I also like other confusing time shifting stories where the story starts to make sense later.
The characters only meet through their letters with a couple of exceptions, so some say the love story is unbelievable. For me, it reflects the extreme isolation and loneliness of their work and how even minimal tenuous companionship of a peer would satisfy a gaping need.
The writing includes extravagant romantic feelings and poetic literary allusions to go with the science fiction and time travel aspect. I appreciated it, but people who like romance and poetry don’t always like science fiction and time travel and vice versa.
The authors lean into the epistolary format. It’s not exclusively letters but a significant percentage of the writing is the letters these two characters exchange.
This book reminds me of some classic novels that also are somewhat polarizing.
!Romeo and Juliet, (I know a play), Tale of Two Cities, O Henry Gift of the Magi!<
The creative forms the letters take were fun for me and seemed like a valid extrapolation of actual historical spycraft if you assumed much greater ability to manipulate matter. However some people find them over the top.
It is an exuberant, enthusiastic book that is fun if you like it and possibly cringy if you don’t
the thing this book felt the most like to me was Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. It’s like the narrative is there, but it’s not (that) important. This is a story about having readers enter a dreamscape and be surrounded by the poetry of it all. Literalists will hate this.
That’s fair. I liked the book, didn’t love it, and that’s probably because while I admired the inventiveness of their communications there wasn’t really much of a story, and I do, as a rule, like books to have a plot.