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Nov. 23rd, 2019 08:23 pmI read This Is How You Lose The Time War, the lesbian time travel epistolary romance everyone is talking about this season!
... I read it very fast, because I missed that my library e-book hold had come in until the day before it was due, so this is not going to be the most in-depth review. But I enjoyed it! (By this point I had seen both a first wave of "lesbian time-travel enemies-to-lovers! genius! incredible!" reactions and then a second wave of "the worldbuilding is not very concrete and the voices both sound a little the same though" reactions so I was feeling a pleasant lack of pressure to either like or dislike it.) The novel is mostly epistolary, framed with little surrealist bits about how the warring time agents send each other letters, and indeed the epistolary voices do sound surprisingly similar given that one time agent appears to come from a high-tech future cyborg society and the other was grown in some variety of all-encompassing future solarpunk garden.
On the other hand, the language is very pretty, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone are clearly having a time and a half diving deep into injokes and wordplay (I really enjoyed the letter delivered by seal that included a discourse on sealing letters! I'm an easy sell!), and the ending leans into the time travel element in a way that's satisfying emotionally and logistically, with that kind of perfect logic-puzzle click that only really good time travel stuff delivers. Generally all the parts where the protagonists directly and indirectly interact with other through the timeline were cool and specific and neat!
(Conversely the many, many sections that were like "she sent me a message through the medium of a subway mural daubed in twelve specific contrasting shades of cyan" were all lovely and numinous and gave me no logic-puzzle-click satisfaction at all. But I also suspect many of those sections included more clever wordplay and interesting implications that I would have enjoyed and picked up on if I had not been zooming through so fast.)
PS: while I'm on the topic of trendy lesbian time travel books, will whoever on my dwlist linked to the article from a month or so ago about all this year's other trendy lesbian time travel books please relink to that post, because I can't remember where it was and I would like to read them!
... I read it very fast, because I missed that my library e-book hold had come in until the day before it was due, so this is not going to be the most in-depth review. But I enjoyed it! (By this point I had seen both a first wave of "lesbian time-travel enemies-to-lovers! genius! incredible!" reactions and then a second wave of "the worldbuilding is not very concrete and the voices both sound a little the same though" reactions so I was feeling a pleasant lack of pressure to either like or dislike it.) The novel is mostly epistolary, framed with little surrealist bits about how the warring time agents send each other letters, and indeed the epistolary voices do sound surprisingly similar given that one time agent appears to come from a high-tech future cyborg society and the other was grown in some variety of all-encompassing future solarpunk garden.
On the other hand, the language is very pretty, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone are clearly having a time and a half diving deep into injokes and wordplay (I really enjoyed the letter delivered by seal that included a discourse on sealing letters! I'm an easy sell!), and the ending leans into the time travel element in a way that's satisfying emotionally and logistically, with that kind of perfect logic-puzzle click that only really good time travel stuff delivers. Generally all the parts where the protagonists directly and indirectly interact with other through the timeline were cool and specific and neat!
(Conversely the many, many sections that were like "she sent me a message through the medium of a subway mural daubed in twelve specific contrasting shades of cyan" were all lovely and numinous and gave me no logic-puzzle-click satisfaction at all. But I also suspect many of those sections included more clever wordplay and interesting implications that I would have enjoyed and picked up on if I had not been zooming through so fast.)
PS: while I'm on the topic of trendy lesbian time travel books, will whoever on my dwlist linked to the article from a month or so ago about all this year's other trendy lesbian time travel books please relink to that post, because I can't remember where it was and I would like to read them!
