I wanted to like this book. I really, really did. The last 100 pages find such a delicate balance between lyricism and plot that I wanted to rate them separately. I enjoyed them a lot. But the middle 100 were so repetitive and shallow that I found myself immensely bored. I think I'm just not enough of a romantic to savor it as it is.

The story is beautifully written, but I was painfully aware the whole time that all these pretty words were saying very little other than how much they love each other for some reason we are never explained. We explore 1001 ways to write poetics about colors and compose love letters, but have to dig for any information about what the hell is going on. (Until those last 100 or so pages that I actually enjoyed besides the prose, wish we had more of that)

Now, I understand that it was The Point. This Is How You Lose The Time War is not a story about the war, is about two people finding love in the midst of it. I just didn't care. At all. I'm very much a plot person unless we have extremely complex characters, which wasn't the case here. This isn't a fault in execution, just an umatched set of style and reader.

This book is really good at being what it wants to be. I would just have liked it better if it was something different.