This Is How You Lose The Time War is a novella I should have loved. A queer, epistolary time travel romance is exactly the kind of story I could fall in love with. Unfortunately, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's prose hindered my ability to enjoy this story.

This book was enamoured with elaborate prose and obscure literary references to the point of confusion. While the authors' flowery prose was well suited to describing the love between our two protagonists the vagueness of their writing style obscured my ability to understand the mechanism of the world. I love time travel stories and I couldn't enjoy those elements in This is How You Lose The Time War because the airy-fairy writing did very little to explain what was actually going on at any given moment. There were a scant handful of time travel moments I found enjoyable to read, generally, those rooted in history, but the vast majority of it was difficult to parse or imagine. Ultimately this novella was filled with pretty sentences stacked on top of each other that didn't amount to much cumulatively.

Despite my frustrations, I did find myself eventually taken by the romance between Red and Blue. Like I said El-Mohtar and Gladstone's writing was perfectly suited for grand declarations of love and tender longing. Eventually buying into the romance somewhat salvaged the reading experience but couldn't erase just how tedious I found the prose for the majority of the story.

So, after years of hype, This Is How You Lose The Time War ended up being a disappointment. If you're interested in reading a queer, epistolary time travel romance novella I'd highly recommend checking out Time Was by Ian McDonald instead.