This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Title: This is How You Lose the Time War

Author: Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Read by:  Cynthia Farrell and Emily Woo Zellner

Publisher: Simon & Shuster Audio

Length: Approximately 4 hours and 16 minutes

Source: Review Copy from Simon & Shuster Audio.  Thank-you!

I am a super fan of anything having to do with time travel.  I also love sci-fi.  When I saw this audiobook available to review, I was intrigued and snapped it up.  I eagerly started listening to it on my drive to Milwaukee yesterday.

Red and Blue are two-time travelers on different sides of a war that spans space and time.  They start to write each other letters to get to know each other, while also trying to kill each other.

This is How You Lose the Time War is written beautifully and is very poetic, but I had a hard time following it.  There wasn’t much of a plot or background to understand what is going on.  The novel is mostly an epistolary novel of the letters between the two.  What were Red and Blue?  They didn’t seem human and seemed to be shape shifters of some sort?  Were did they get the skills to be killers?  What is the war about?

After listening to two hours of the audiobook, I still didn’t have any answers and didn’t really know what was going on.  As I got in the car to go home, I realized I didn’t care to find out what was happening.  I don’t usually not finish a book, but I just couldn’t bring myself to care about this one.

Would I have enjoyed it more as text rather than an audiobook on my long drive?  The narrators were good, but there wasn’t much of a difference between them so it took awhile for me to realize there were two different narrators.

Overall, This is How You Lose the Time War was sadly not an enjoyable experience for me. Come for the beautiful language, but don’t pick this up if you are looking for a good plot.