soph (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophia_sol) wrote2020-07-07 06:05 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2020-07-07 06:05 pm
This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
I'd been looking forward to this novella for a while: f/f epistolary fiction featuring time travel sounded so exciting to me! I'm disappointed to discover that the way these things were done in this particular book didn't really work for me. Sigh.
So the book is about Red and Blue, both agents in a time war, on opposite sides of the war, who start taunting each other via letter and then fall in love.
And like, I guess my problem is that the whole thing just felt so ungrounded to me. I had so little sense of what actually happened on their various missions and why, or of how their disparate worlds in which they grew up might have affected them differently, or even just of any distinction between the two main characters because their voices were so similar.
And it does exactly what I said in my last book review that I don't like to see in a romance novel: it is so tightly focused in on the relationship between the two leads that it doesn't really have interest in anything else, and just kind of gestures vaguely at the greater context the two of them live and work in.
None of which I think makes it a bad book, just that the things this book is interested in doing are different than the things I'm interested in reading about. Alas.
So the book is about Red and Blue, both agents in a time war, on opposite sides of the war, who start taunting each other via letter and then fall in love.
And like, I guess my problem is that the whole thing just felt so ungrounded to me. I had so little sense of what actually happened on their various missions and why, or of how their disparate worlds in which they grew up might have affected them differently, or even just of any distinction between the two main characters because their voices were so similar.
And it does exactly what I said in my last book review that I don't like to see in a romance novel: it is so tightly focused in on the relationship between the two leads that it doesn't really have interest in anything else, and just kind of gestures vaguely at the greater context the two of them live and work in.
None of which I think makes it a bad book, just that the things this book is interested in doing are different than the things I'm interested in reading about. Alas.