I plucked this book from my reading list because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to read next but I really needed to leave and catch the train to work. This Is How You Lose the Time War won because it’s a novella that’s just over 200 pages. I started reading it to buy time, which, in retrospect, is appropriate given the book’s plot.

I’m glad I hit the buy button that morning; serendipity delivered.

This Is How You Lose the Time War is a sci-fi romp forwards and backwards through time told from the perspective of two agents on opposing sides as they spiral towards and fall in love with each other. The structure is the same throughout: Red does something, Red reads a letter from Blue, Blue does something, Blue reads a letter from Red, and repeat.

The deep love that blossoms between them is a bit of a stretch but the longing expressed through and around letters they leave for one another makes up for it. This brand of sci-fi romance is so decorated with its prose—quite purple and not for everyone—that it borders on the fantastical. There are so many gorgeous lines and passages that fit words together in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

Blue carries nothing with her between strands except knowledge, purpose, tactics, and Red’s letters. Memory is tipped and decanted into Garden, life to life to life, always deepening, thickening, growing new roots and efficiencies—but Red’s letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her fingers’ tips, between the lines of her palms. She presses them against her teeth before kissing her marks, reads them over when she shifts her grip on motorcycle handles, dusts soldiers’ chins with them in bar fights and barracks games. She thinks without thinking, often, of what she will name Red in her next letter—hides her lists in plausibly deniable dreamscapes, on the undersides of milkweed leaves, in shed chrysalis and wingtip. Vermillion Lie. Scarlet Tanager. Parthian Thread. My Red, Red Rose.

The writer in me was impressed (daunted, too). The reader in me grew exhausted by the end. Overall, I enjoyed it but it’s not a recommendation I can make for every reader.