content warnings: gore, violence, self-mutilation, poisoning, death
representation: sapphic main characters, f/f main relationship

“Red’s letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her fingers’ tips, between the lines of her palms. She presses them against her teeth before kissing her marks, reads them over when she shifts her grip on motorcycle handles, dusts soldiers’ chins with them in bar fights and barracks games. She thinks without thinking, often, of what she will name Red in her next letter―hides her lists in plausibly deniable dreamscapes, on the undersides of milkweed leaves, in shed chrysalis and wingtip. Vermillion Lie. Scarlet Tanager. Parthian Thread. My Red, Red Rose.”

This might be my favourite book of the year. I also totally understand if you don't like this book. At not-even 200 pages, This Is How You Lose the Time War is a strange, difficult book that has no interest in making itself accessible. You're thrown into a world you don't know with characters you know nothing about but it seems as if you've been with them for years. There is not a word of dialogue spoken for almost 100 pages. The little description you get of our lead characters is clearly inhuman. Terminology is used that you know nothing about and is never explained.

And I loved every second of it.

I can't describe this book in any way that will do it justice, so I'm going to give you the most simple description possible: Blue and Red are on opposite sides of a conflict and begin to write secret letters to each other, at first to taunt but it quickly becomes more.

That's it, that's all you need. Not only is this book near-impossible to describe, it's also one you should go into knowing as little as possible. The plot ultimately isn't what's important, anyway. It's all about the gorgeous romance between these two lead characters.

I'm a sucker for enemies to lovers and one of my favourite flavours of that trope is two people on opposing sides of a war so I was predisposed to love this. The majority of the book is told in letters between Red and Blue as they get to know each other, both always suspicious but slowly lowering their guards as time goes on. I adored them both. We ultimately know very little of their lives and are missing many big details, but the things we do know are so much more important. We know the small things they dare to share with one another, the minuscule things that seem inconsequential but are vital in understanding them. So as the book goes on, we fall in love with them as they fall in love with each other.

This book is so short but so effective, and I honestly want to reread it already. I was vibing with it from page 1, not caring that I had no idea what was happening and just along for the ride. Some people can't do that and I get it. This is exactly the kind of book that some people will read and not get the hype, and others will read and fall in love with. I definitely fall into the latter category. Expect this on my Best of the Year list.