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A review by uselessmathom
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar
1.0
One of the most disappointing books I've read in a long time. With such an interesting concept, I suppose I expected more than just a hundred love letters essentially reiterating the same message. And that is another gripe I have: it didn't really feel like the relationship between Red and Blue had any sort of arc, the tone of their correspondence is pretty much the same first letter to last.
With such scarce worldbuilding and very little detail about the two opposing organisations and their goals, the reader is left with the vaguest of skeletons for an enemies-to-lovers story (which even Good Omens did better, and they aren't even lovers there). This shifts the focus to the emotion and language of this book, which, truth be told, I enjoyed more than it deserved me to. It's a very... Classics nerd meets Arabic poetry enthusiast kind of language. Extremely pink, extremely flowery, but it has a lot of character. The problem is that it doesn't really give the two protagonists different voices, which is all the more jarring given that extremely unique character of the language the letters are written in.
With such scarce worldbuilding and very little detail about the two opposing organisations and their goals, the reader is left with the vaguest of skeletons for an enemies-to-lovers story (which even Good Omens did better, and they aren't even lovers there). This shifts the focus to the emotion and language of this book, which, truth be told, I enjoyed more than it deserved me to. It's a very... Classics nerd meets Arabic poetry enthusiast kind of language. Extremely pink, extremely flowery, but it has a lot of character. The problem is that it doesn't really give the two protagonists different voices, which is all the more jarring given that extremely unique character of the language the letters are written in.