This Is How You Lose The Time War By Amal El-Mothar and Max Gladstone is a science fiction love story featuring a spy vs. spy storyline with time travel agents. What happens when one time traveler writes a note to her rival? They start a letter writing correspondence through time. The novel flows like a poem as the time travelers try to one up each other with diction, prose, and literature. There where times when I was head scratching some of the words and what they mean. A couple of the letter are on blooming plants which I found hard to imagine with the limited description given. The novel is short with it being just over 200 pages.

The Plot: Red is a time traveler who just scored a victory in a war, or so she thought she finds a note that says, burn before reading, She does and recreates the note that Blue wrote where she saved some of warriors, defying Red’s orders to not leave anyone alive. What happens next is a Spy vs. Spy scenario straight out of Mad magazine, where they keep sabotaging the other’s mission then bragging about it in the letter. Only they fall in love with letter writing and the correspondence to one another. Almost each letter is signed we will win the time war. but the words lose they’re meaning as the hate that they had turns to something else between Red and Blue.

What I Liked: I liked the outcome of all the letter writing, I thought the overall arc of the story was good. I liked how through the letters you can feel the emotions change. Most of the setting seemed cool. I liked it best when we are told the objective and what it does in future time. I liked all the words they came up with to describe red and blue.

What I Disliked: There are no rules of time travel established. Description is really lacking, so a lot is hard to picture. We never get how the can track each other through time. The words were beautiful, but with out relevance all they are is words, which is something this book does a good deal as they talk about future events too much.

Recommendations: I wanted to like this more than I did, I am not going to recommend this one, but I also know some people who are going to love this one. If you love letter writing then this novel is a love letter to it. If you love metaphorical prose and poetry then this is the book for you. I rated This Is How You Lose The Time War By Amal El-Mothar and Max Gladstone 3 out of 5 stars.