This Is How You Lose the Time War

Review

I heard a lot of good things about this book, so I think I went into it with too much expectation of what I thought it was, and without doing enough research to see what it was about. Normally I like to go in blind and see how I feel about a work.

I think that poetic romance sci-fi might just not be my genre. Let's start with both these writers are extremely talented and write well. The problem I had is every location in the book, it felt like the writers were telling us something because they thought of it and not because we needed to know it for the plot. What I mean there is that the subtext of the time war just didn't feel as fleshed out to me. How the battle was really working between both sides. How they were working against each other, and I found myself wanting more of how the back-bone of the story worked.

The second problem I had was the letters. The voices were overly wrought and the pop-culture references felt forced for me. But, again, if this is the poetic nature of this writing style, then I suspect it's just not something I read so that is likely more on me.

But, I do want to talk about the asymmetric sides of this time war. That part I loved. And again, I wanted to know more about both sides, but even from what I got, I thought that part worked really well. How different they were. This was one part where the book shined.

For a romance novel, getting to the end, I honestly didn't feel emotionally connected to either character, and that is most of what drove my review. I do very much get attached to characters in stories, but that just didn't happen here.