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This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone (Review)

Posted by Eric Hendel December 31, 2020

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This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone (Review)

(Cover Artist: Greg Stadnyk) There's something extremely important about Amal El-Mohtar 's and Max Gladstone 's 2019 novella This Is How You Lose the Time War , which is that one of the most interesting stories the book tells is one that only becomes apparent very close to the end. For much of its admittedly brief 198 pages, This Is How You Lose the Time War takes the form of an imaginative but also straight-forward love story developing between two would-be enemies, with the book's chapters consisting primarily of letters produced by two time-traveling spies who write to each other from various eras of history. While skillfully written, these portions of the story sometimes come across as simplistic, with much of the book concerned exclusively with a depiction of the unlikely love that slowly builds between these two characters as they attempt (at first) to erase each other from existence. All of this establishes El-Mohtar's and Gladstone's novella ...

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