414. This Is How You Lose the Time War

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:  Drue Emerson

Author:   Amal El-Mohtar

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction

209 pages, published July 16, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

This Is How You Lose the Time War is written from by two authors, Amal-El Mohtar and Max Gladstone, and is told from the perspectives of Red and Blue, two time-traveling agents from warring futures who are working their way through the past.  Red and Blue begin to exchange letters which leads them to fall in love.

Quotes 

“I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.  I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.”

 

“Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.”

 

“And everyone is alive, somewhere in time.”

 

“But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me.  I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.”

 

“Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down.”

 

“I love you. I love you. I love you. 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.”

 

“It’s amazing how much blue there is in the world if you look. You’re different colors of flame. Bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germanium, and arsenic. See? I pour you into things.”

 

“Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.”

 

My Take

While there are some beautiful and poetic parts of This Is How You Lose the Time War, I just couldn’t get into this book.  The plot (what there was of one) was difficult to follow and I often didn’t know what was going on.  However, it may just be me.  There are many others who really like this book.