ABOUT THE BOOK:
As agents Red and Blue travel back and forth through time, altering the history of multiple universes on behalf of their warring empires, they leave each other secret messages—at first taunting, but gradually developing into flirtation and then love. When Red’s commanding officer detects the interaction between Red and Blue, she forces Red to send Blue a message that will kill Blue when it is read. After Blue is killed, Red time-travels to Blue’s childhood to give her immunity to the poisoned message, allowing her to survive.
REVIEW BY DANIA:
I only have good things to say about this book “This is How You Lose the Time War”. So let’s start with those. The letters that Red and Blue wrote to each other were so heartfelt and some of them absolutely broke my heart. The part that caught my eye was the fact that the letters were not addressed to blue or red but they were addressed to things like raspberry and the sea respectively. Another thing that I liked was that Red and Blue fell in love with each other through their letters. Now that is true love. It’s true love because they fell in love with the raw parts of each other, without their armour. But what really broke me was when Blue said that she had only started noticing which things were red, after she started writing letters to Red. It was the fact that her love for Red made her notice things that reminded Blue of Red like raspberries or the sunset. I also like the fact that this was a kind of enemies to lovers. I haven’t read a lot of enemies to lovers books but by far, this is one of my favourite ones.
There was only one thing I didn’t like in this book, the world-building and how the world worked was hardly explained or explained very late into the book. So, I think the world-building could have been better and then I think I would have loved the book even more.
But, let me say this again, I LOVED THIS BOOK.
OTHER INFORMATION:
The book won the BSFA Award for Best Shorter Fiction, the Nebula Award for Best Novella of 2019 and the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novella.
TRIGGER WARNINGS:
1. Animal killing
2. Gore
3. Rape (mentioned)
4. Self-harm
5. Suicide (mentioned)
6. Torture
7. War/Violence
