This Is How You Lose the Time War

Starred review from April 1, 2019
In this exquisitely crafted tale, two special agents from competing factions forge an unexpected relationship through messages left behind as they wage a secret war across space and time. Red, who represents a society dominated by technology and artificial intelligences, and Blue, the product of a biological mass consciousness, must never—can never—meet, even as they work to secure the future for their masters. Instead, they communicate in hundreds of different ways, their words hidden beneath layers of subtlety and deception, in direct defiance of every rule they’ve ever followed. As taunts and challenges gradually give way to endearments and secrets, the two women must determine their true roles in the unending time war. Part epistolary romance, part mind-blowing science fiction adventure, this dazzling story unfolds bit by bit, revealing layers of meaning as it plays with cause and effect, wildly imaginative technologies, and increasingly intricate wordplay. El-Mohtar (The Honey Month) and Gladstone (the Craft Sequence) pack their narrative full of fanciful ideas and poignant moments, weaving a tapestry stretching across the millennia and through multiple realities that’s anchored with raw emotion and a genuine sense of wonder. This short novel warrants multiple readings to fully unlock its complexities. Agent: DongWon Song, Howard Morhaim Literary.

Starred review from June 1, 2019

Red is the Agency's best agent, settling scores of time lines in the past and future to ensure her technological group's success. Until the day she finds a letter on a bloody battlefield inscribed "Burn Before Reading." Blue travels up and down the time lines for the organic consciousness of the Garden, securing her victories as she receives a response to her missive in water. Through a correspondence that slides through the past and futures, two of the most solitary and destructive rivals find that the thrill of their communication exceeds their directives. What happens when warring factions turn to words? Triumph is the goal for this unending time war. Or at least, that is what Blue and Red believe. VERDICT This stunning, semi-epistolary tale by coauthors El-Mohtar (The Honey Month) and Gladstone ("Craft Sequence" series) is a seamless story of time travel, sparring opponents, and the revelations of serving a cause. To unlock the complexities of language and plot here, readers will want to return to this book, with each read revealing a little more of its near-limitless substance.--Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2019
Red is a time-traveling agent who rebraids strands to help the Agency, a world of tech and logic. Blue is an agent who rebraids for the Garden, a community rooted in organic matter. They have been doing and undoing each other's work for years when Blue leaves Red the first letter. The two female spies battle across the strands, sabotaging each other's missions with increasing subtlety and skill, and leaving each other letters contained in the taste of sumac, in the pattern of a fabric's weave, in the flow of lava over Atlantis, in a piece of cod hidden within a seal. What unfolds is a twisting, sapphic time travel fantasy love story that never stops surprising: El-Mohtar and Gladstone have written the ultimate in enemies-to-lovers romance, but with an intricate layer of lush, uncanny descriptions of the fantastic strands the agents are shifting; not to mention a careful net of time travel and parallel universes. This suspenseful novel is a superb realization of a difficult concept bulging with details: a time travel rival-secret-agent epistolary romance interspersed with descriptions of fascinating secret missions. Readers will reach the end and want to turn back to the start.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)