A review by gengelcox
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar

adventurous challenging dark mysterious slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Loveable characters? No

2.0

TL;DR for those of you who don’t want the specifics: I didn’t care for this for two reasons, style and believability. I’ll hide the rest under a spoiler tag. 

 

For the genres of speculative fiction, I tend to observe a particular rule when reading: I’ll suspend my disbelief for a couple of things (magic works, people can travel faster-than-light), but only a couple. Otherwise, you’re writing without a net, where anything goes, and that’s not my thing typically, no matter how exciting or interesting your characters or world are. (Yes, Virginia, there’s always some exceptions, which you know what.) 
 
This Is How You Lose the Time War fails on this front. I was willing to believe in a time war and characters engaging in a duel, fighting each other to preserve or create a time stream in which their viewpoint succeeds. But that’s not what this book is about. Instead, it centers on the ability of the two characters to craft encoded messages that only the other can decode and read, and the ensuing dialogue between the two combatants. These letters and their unusual cryptography becomes an indulgence between the two authors, I believe, who crafted this book by each taking a character and writing the sections and letters from that viewpoint. With each letter, the authors attempt to one-up the other in the manner and method of its creation. The first couple, I thought, okay, but each letter became more extreme, requiring vast amounts of coincidence and incredible luck for writer and reader. After the fourth, I really began to nope, starting to see these characters as not only more than human, but superhuman in their longevity, patience, and abilities. 
 
The one-up-manship also comes through in the language of the letters themselves, which from the start tended to be a lot more ornate and poetic than my normal reading material, and never stopped being that way, even creeping into the non-letter scene descriptions. Unlike the other, this is a personal peccadillo, and I recognize other readers have a higher tolerance for that kind of prose, finding it evocative whereas I find it purplish. 
 
This is unfortunate, because I wanted to like this recent award-winner. But because of those elements, my critical brain kicked in and I started to focus on the writerly construction of this novella rather than enjoying it as a story. I figured out fairly early on that the seeker would end up being one of the agents, coming back to recover information missed in the first reading. While I didn’t necessarily predict the ending, it didn’t come as a surprise being basically a repeat of how a number of previous time travel stories resolve by becoming worm ouroboroses. 
 
So what’s left after you get past all that was the love affair between the two main characters. Unfortunately, I didn’t find it very believable either, mainly because the growing attraction between them is presented at a remove, filtered by the letters, rather than depicted through dramatic sequences, an unfortunate effect of both the chosen format (letters are inherently a distancing mechanism from the action or events depicted) and the setting (some of these “letters” and events happen over a century, so the reader misses so much of what grows between these characters in all that intervening time). Basically, for me, this book fails because it becomes all tell and hardly any show for the most important element of the story. 
 
These things obviously bother others less than me (as indicated by its award win and now bestseller status), so Your Mileage May Vary.