Every year, for the past four years, I have read the same book. As soon as it hits January 1, I know immediately what my first book of the year will be. “But Alex,” I hear you cry in dismay, “Doesn’t that get boring? Reading the same book over and over again?” Sure, maybe if the book did not evolve on itself every time you read it.
Thankfully, the book I read every year is “This Is How You Lose The Time War,” the mind-bending, heart wrenching and genre-defying queer romance across time and space by co-authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, that teaches me something new every time I crack open its well-loved pages.
The story follows two female agents, working on opposite sides of a war in order to sway the timeline into their side’s ideal future. Red, an operative and trained assassin for the Agency, finds her plans foiled by an unknown assailant from the other side. In the remains of her failure, she finds a letter. It reads: “Burn before reading.” At the end, the name Blue. So begins the ultimate deadly game of cat and mouse, played across planets and timelines. Each foiling each other's plans, taunting each other with letters placed in the most unlikely of places: iInside a seal’s stomach, engraved into its last meal, carved into the rings of a tree over a hundred years, a voice carried through whittled bones, swirls of leaves within a tea cup.
The taunting soon turns into flirtation, and that flirtation dissolves irrevocably into love. But Red and Blue are separated throughout time and confined within their own factions. They pose not only danger to each other, but danger from their own head offices if their correspondence is found out. Communicating with the enemy is treason, and grounds for an excruciating execution.
This year, as I picked up my favorite book yet again, I did something I had never done before: I opened up a notebook and wrote down every single reference, nod, allusion and term I did not get the first three times around. It was like the novel had become something entirely new. I was gathering quotes alluding to poems published over a hundred years ago, learning all the bones within the hand, reading up about the origin of Atlantis and learning way too many different shades of red and blue. There are so many little details in this book. References that were dear to the authors’ hearts, but were things I had no idea about. They are by no means necessary to know to understand the story. Yet, knowing them now, I appreciate this story so much more and the world around me as a whole.
The amount of love and care put into this book is simply incredible. You can feel it on every page, in every word. You can feel the love of these two characters seeping out from the pages, so much that one novel cannot contain all of it. Every quote of their love is like a punch to the gut, stealing your breath with how beautiful their poetry is. In no other novel could you find such quotes as, “I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you,” and “I want to meet you in every place I ever loved. Listen to me. I am your echo. I would rather break the world than lose you.”
It is cliche to say, but “This Is How You Lose The Time War” is truly a book like no other. Nothing like this has been done before, I doubt anything like it will ever be done again. Even through my words I cannot express how truly magical this book is. It is simply a novel you have to experience for yourself.
I cannot wait to read this book again and again, year after year. Each time, finding something new. A little more love in the world. As the novel writes, “books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.” I hope you will pick up this wonderful novel, and save the world with me. Again, and again and again.