idk how to explain my deep aching love for this book so i’m just gonna insert quotes that made me feel something “it is such luxury to dwell in things details—to share them with you. I want, Red— I want to give you things.”“Words, Hurt. I can hide in words so long as I scatter them through my body; to read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrange and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room”“love, Blue”“I want to chase you, find you, I ...

A book about communication (both between the characters and the two authors of the novel), as well as yearning and betrayal. Its lyrical prose is mesmerising as it drip-feeds information to the reader.It's definitely a book of two halves, in that the first 70-ish pages don't really make any sense while you're first reading them. You really have to work through a lot of complicated sci-fi world-building to (eventually) appreciate the plot's mighty crescendo, which is very spectacular. Mixed feeli...

‘I want to be a context for you, and you for me.’There is something uniquely affecting when love is painted against the backdrop of the limitlessness of space and time. The effect has been done many times over but nothing can prepare you for the extraordinary beauty in which This is How You Lose the Time War allows you to experience love stretching out and weaving across time and dimensions to examine just how infinite it can possibly be. A spark of emotion that shines through galaxies reduced t...

I do not know how to write five star reviews.Give me a book I hate and I’ll write a full-on thesis on it. Prime example: Just yesterday I spent one human hour on a seven-page one star rant review. And honestly? Time well spent.But when it comes to something I truly love? I’m illiterate. Can’t read. Can’t write. Call me Jared, 19. What am I doing on this book site? Couldn’t tell you.I WANT to scream about this from the rooftops. I want each and every one of you to read it, because it is utterly o...

Reread in 2023, still a banger---This is the most fun I’ve had reading this writing style in a while! It’s such a creative, abstract, lyrical, and well-written love story that not only did I re-listen to each chapter twice on audiobook, but I also ended up borrowing the ebook just so that I could digest the writing via my eyeballs. There were many sensory experiences and beautifully crafted letters. The cat-and-mouse game between the two female protagonists is fun to read and the intimacy that b...

this book is very confusing because there are lines like “Dearest, deepest Blue— At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you” that make you think, simply, oh......

and then there’s the fact that I had no idea what the hell was going on

Almost all my Goodread friends are raving about this. I just didn't like it. I never really understood why the characters fell in love, there's no explanation about what is really going on with the two sides and the writing style was just too... "extra" for me. It's very literary and poetic, it's all words and not much substance. It just wasn't for me.

This book made me feel really dumb. I don't think it was the book's fault. The combination of high science fiction with poetic literary fiction just didn't click together in my brain. There was never a point in this book where I knew what was going on. I just finished it and have no idea what happened in it.

This Is How You Lose the Time War does not make it easy for any reviewer to describe it. As soon as you start to put words in, you hit a wall. How does one explain the action of the novel without surrendering any spoilers? I can tell you that the first strand running through this loosely-braided narrative comes in the form of a letter. That the first of its kind is only pretend, an instant of self-indulgence, but that it began a circling of time for Red, the past cutting into the present like a ...

2ish stars.What it comes down to is that I'm simply not enough of a romantic to enjoy this book. The appeal lies squarely in the flowery language written in love poems between two post-human women on opposite sides of a time travel war. I just happen to find love poetry more pretentious and mawkish than amorous or emotive. (Can it even really be considered romantic when one character addresses the other as "Dearest Blue-da-ba-dee?")The rest of the book (characters, setting, plot) is left intenti...