This Is How You Lose the Time War

Burn before reading.

What starts as a puzzling statement unravels in the sweeping novella This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

Red and Blue are at odds, and they might also be in love. They might always have been in love, and its their stories – past, present, and future – that El-Mohtar and Gladstone have so poetically intertwined in this slim volume.

I bought my copy of Time War on the banks of the River Thames during a pocket of quiet time I’d carved for myself on a cool day in March. The pixelated, fragmented, and re-pieced cover – two birds: one red, one blue – called to me from the blond, wooden shelves. Quiet time ended, I bagged the book and let it travel with me back home to Kansas.

Red is robotic, precise, cruel. Blue is floral, rooted, deadly. Their dance through history recounts their war, each respecting the other’s destruction while flaunting their own prowess at outsmarting the powers that be. But what starts as mutual respect turns to potential interest turns to bubbling love turns to distraught betrayal turns to a loop meant to unpick the twists and taunts Red and Blue have laid for each other.

Forwards and backwards and sideways, this book found me reading and re-reading lines, savoring phrases, and recalling small details that rippled into future cataclysms as Red and Blue danced through time. The quiet time that started for me on the banks of the Thames has resonated – will always resonate – now that I’ve turned the final page.

Only to find myself longing for the beginning.