This is How You Lose the Time War is a high concept epistolary love story. Red and Blue are mirror-images, history hopping agent provocateurs subtly shaping the tangled threads of the multiverse for their cosmological ideologies. Red for the mechanist Agency, Blue for the biological Garden. An exchange of letters begins as taunts, and blossoms into love, and than a dangerous defection.

The framing is perfect scifi rigamarol, dancing through sketches of other realities with verb and style. The love story between the two... well, I almost missed the point where it switched from taunts to flirting to proclamations of undying love. Let's just say that it's more mood than characterization.

And oddly enough, I much prefer Blue to Red. This book was written by Gladstone (The Craft Series) and El-Mohtar, who I hadn't heard of, but who crushed the 2016-2017 short story awards with "Seasons of Glass and Iron." I wonder who wrote who...