Lauren☂︎☼♤☘︎’s Reviews > This Is How You Lose the Time War > Status Update

And while I’m holding out judgement for the run of its course, still rightly am I subject to the marvel of its outset. In ideation and in terrain, in situation and in inauguration, the narrative is forthright and instructive in the set-up and expectation of how it’s to proceed. So even with my current headway, already has it worked to establish its solidity of structural symmetry, with readers quickly catching wind of a precedent for the rhythm of its tune. Narrative matter isn’t the only realm of this story subject to the technology of its science-fiction, as narrative technique in turn employs a respective logic.

Further, this sense to the storytelling approach, in its literary procedure and rhetorical idiosyncrasy, has been intermediary in challenging me to acclimate its style. I, in my high standards for comprehension requisite for reading progression, have found myself branching out in the posture of readership TIHYLTTW beckons. This to say, the book, so far, seems to impel readers of their orientation in it. Rather than, this is, using the fictional world and its determinants to be carried through the storyline, such assimilation is resisted. TIHYLTTW does not let us collude with its invented physics, unique logic, and respective convention (at least not yet). We have but one thing to which we can cling, the plot of Red’s and Blue’s relation. Purposely disabling narrative alignments to its world and situation — that would make the war and time travel plot followable —, readers must then opt for the correspondence of the two disparate agents as the sense of continuity through which threads the book’s progression and their’s in it.

The world (at reader’s initiation), in this respect, is interesting. It’s express in its engagement not necessitating mastery on readers’ behalf, TIHYLTTW’s principles suspended in unfamiliar images in lieu of nailing them down to a ciphered working system. Imagination, scope, and latitude, but also disconcertment, mystification, and distance take hold and occupy readers’ perception. Instead of readers being active in determining their understanding, they are instead determined by the book’s sensuous assertion of its evocative mystery, scintillating datum, poetic finesse, and inventive peagantry — all of which are employed to foreground its premise, a love story. This said, the convolution of its decorum and elation of its ornament have exacted slowness and iteration from my readership, which has fostered an engaging utility of discipline and invigorating sense of contentment with disorientation in entailing me to trust in the story’s means of deposition — that I don’t need to mount it in order to embrace it.

Beyond its procedural proclivity, TIHYLTTW’s narrative fount constellates a number of intrigues, so that interesting attractors approach readers from all sides. The enemies-to-lovers arrangement is thus far being expertly handled, with the obsession of conquest a compelling pretext for intimacy of thought and determination of pursuit — along with the notion that each character is so adept, the prospect of being thwarted and the energy of being challenged engenders a tickling sense to their attention and interest. I also really like that the premise of letter-writing, enrolling a conversation, subverts the expected normalcy of the act. The newfound mundaness of war-mongering and world-destroying dispossess the simplicity of a written communication; as such, it’s this simple act that is configured to be seditious, dangerous, and risky — the motive for secrecy in sharing it. Finally, the backdrop of time travel has been fascinating in its pure conceptual terrain. The book’s use of it to dress its world in the wondrous unpredictability of outcome has been fun and imaginative.