This Is How You Lose the Time War

Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
This Is How You Lose the Time War Cover

This Is How You Lose the Time War

imnotsusan
1/11/2022
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My partner once described Westworld as "robots robotting at each other," and even though the characters weren't robots (well, maybe one was partially a robot) that's how I felt about this book. I can kind of understand why this book was so praised, but i found it to be a huge disappointment (especially as someone who loves time travel/alternate universe books.) The set-up sounded great - two agents of enemy factions in a time war fall in love. But for a short book, it ended up being a long slog with little pay-off. It felt overwritten; seemingly no sentiment could be expressed without multiple clauses and metaphors and tongue-in-cheek anachronistic pop culture references. Two-thirds of the communication betweeen the characters was just them saying "I love you" in various melodramatic ways - which I think was supposed to feel profound and emotional, but was mostly just tedious. And when I pulled away all of the baroque filler, I got two characters that I couldn't meaningfully distingusih from worlds I couldn't picture who were intensely in love with each for reasons I didn't understand. It was kind of cool that each chapter took place in a different time/universe, but you only got tiny snippets of time/place. The plot itself was decent, but so bare bone I wonder if this would have made a more satisfying short story.