Bookworm in the City

No. 6 – A book that is set in the future
This is How You Lose the Time War / Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Confession: I really, really, want to read The Ministry of Time which would have fitted this category perfectly. However, I also really, really want to finish the reading challenge and with three books to go and three weeks left, size of the book and ease to get it became the higher priorities.
This is How You Lose the Time War is an intriguing title though and I was still eager enough to get my hands on it.

The story is about Blue and Red. They are agents sent to secure the future for their worlds. They travel through time and space to execute the orders they receive. Because their worlds are at war, they are each other’s enemies.
The story starts in the middle of all of this, in the aftermath of a battle that was fought on a dying planet. Red wades through the mass of dead bodies she left behind to pick up a note. The instructions are to burn before reading which is a fun play on normal secret agent talk and it sets the tone. The note is from Blue, her competitor, her enemy.
Red replies to the note by leaving something hidden for Blue to find in the next location she is sent to. And this is how the book continues. Blue or Red arriving somewhere sometime to manipulate the future, and finding a message from the other who had already been there. It leads to messages implanted in the strangest locations which is kind of fun but also confusing at times, such as the ones with words written in a cloud, boiling water, or inside an animal for example. I decided there was no way to understand it, I just had to accept it for what it was and read on.
There never is much of an explanation to anything. How are they travelling? Who is giving their orders and why? The chapters jump from Red to Blue in the same way they jump through time and space: Blue on yet another sinking Atlantis. Red inside a volcano that she’s triggering to erupt at some time.
They don’t care about the worlds and times they arrive at: they’re there to execute an order and that’s it. They are not anthropologists, explorers, or historians; they are ruthless agents.
We do learn that one of them is from an elfish like wood-world, the other is a bot created in a lab but both come with the specific purpose to chase and kill.
Trained and tough as they might be, their jobs are difficult and lonely, and although it is dangerous, they start to look forward to a note left by the other. The notes are sometimes taunting, sometimes honest. Over time the notes become more personal, revealing dreams and fears and love.

This is a kind of high-concept book and very different kind of book, although maybe that’s because I’m not used to reading science fiction. The feel of the story reminded me a lot of the Loki series.
There is so much left unexplained that it makes the book readable because if the time travelling and the worlds, and the reasons for war would have been explained, the story would have become too much to work through. And it probably wouldn’t have made any sense. With all this left out, you can imagine the backstory any way you like; it’s open for interpretation while the story can focus on Blue and Red because despite the war and destruction this is in its core a love story.
This book was a roller coaster ride for me. It started off a bit difficult to get into, then I was fully on board, but the ending was too much for me. It was difficult to keep track of what timeline the story was in and I felt it made things unnecessarily complicated. I would have been okay with the story ending two or even three chapters earlier than it did.
All in all, still glad I read this.