Mini Review | This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

⭐⭐ 2/5 Stars – Huge disappointment! Overwritten, hard to follow and and mawkish romance. All style and no substance.

Format: Kindle

Read: March 2023

I am so disappointed by this. I thought I’d love it! Time war? Sci-fi? Bit weird? Romance? That should check major boxes for me. 2.5 stars because I cannot recall anything that actually happened in the first 75% of it.

As I fought through the pages I’ve been thinking about why it refused to click for me, when I just felt like it really should.

The writing is overwritten & overwrought to my reading taste. It is buried in this thick in poetic language while the authors also give you no context for the world, so it’s very hard work to picture anything that is meant to be happening on the most basic level.

In Piranesi I liked that I didn’t know what was happening but that mystery was the plot of the book & worked it when deployed with more accessible writing, atmosphere, and character-driven story.

That said, as much as I was confused most of the time in Time War, I did still see the big final act twist coming from a mile off (I’d hoped for a twist on the twist!).

It is definitely an issue of personal taste, but I find declarations of love made through layers of poetic metaphor to be pretentious, mawkish, and insincere. (Acts of service are my love language!)

Between the lack of any time the two characters spent together plus all this flowery letter writing – I didn’t find any romance in this book.

It’s Contemporary Lit in Sci-fi dressing and not particularly interested in the sci-fi elements. Felt more of a writing flex than a fleshed-out story IMO.

This Is How You Lose the Time War on Amazon