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Nick Antonoglu

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This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar (Goodreads Author)

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Reading for the 3rd time

read in June 2026

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Nick Antonoglu said: " 8/10

This was a fun, brisk read! I got the same feeling I did as when I read a lot of Gibson’s work last year, in that this felt like a book that loved the medium of writing. And for that alone, it has my praise.

The main highlight, as I previously sta 8/10

This was a fun, brisk read! I got the same feeling I did as when I read a lot of Gibson’s work last year, in that this felt like a book that loved the medium of writing. And for that alone, it has my praise.

The main highlight, as I previously stated, is the prose. While I will acknowledge that some of it is a little too flowery and meandering for my tastes, there is a sense of wonder and magic pervading the way this book is written that really enhances the bizarre premise. I like that a lot of the information is left unwritten. Time travel is a very difficult thing to engage with, and I think leaving the book vague is a great way of getting around a lot of the pitfalls time travel gets into.

Since this is a good segue, I’m going to talk about the one thing I didn’t like - the impossibility of time travel.

Any book with time travel in it will fall victim to this, and while I think this is one of the better time travel stories out there, some of the old pitfalls still remain. How is there a time war if time is constant and unstoppable? How can something be “outside of time” and still change and grow? Why is so much of this book’s time travel Earth-focused, considering there is obvious indication of extraterrestrial life, and what about relativity? Red and Blue age, but how? How did Garden and the Agency even come into contact with each other? What exactly are they even fighting to change, and how do these small events do this?

These are just some questions I had that never really resolved themselves over the course of reading. To the book’s credit, however, it never really tried to explain the time travel. The authors clearly knew any sort of concrete explanation of how Red and Blue operated would poke more holes than patch.

The romance is great, this one’s for the real yearners out there. I love how it resolves, particularly the explanation for Blue’s hunger. The desire between Red and Blue is so visceral, so desperate, that it had me hooked. And honestly, I was convinced this was going to be a tragedy - and while it kind of is, I love that the authors end it on a hopeful note.

Another thing I enjoyed were the settings. Even the ones grounded in real events had a wonder to them, and a sense that maybe everything wasn’t exactly as you remembered. The lack of information ended up aiding these locales by allowing my own interpretation of the timeline to prevail.

Overall, a fun read, if you ignore the paradoxes of time travel. ...more "

progress:

(page 47 of 209)
— Jul 09, 2026 12:47AM

Jun 27, 2026 07:37AM · see review