My journey to this book was a bit of a strange one. I attended a panel at a UX conference called This is How You Win the Time War that I really liked, and the speaker talked about this book and the concept behind it. The idea of two rival time travelers gently manipulating time in small ways that cause ripples into the future and competing with one another to create different futures was interesting, so I picked it up!
That’s not really what the book is about. The story does follow two time travelers, both on different sides of the time war as they gently manipulate the strands of time to create the future their separate sides want. But that is more of a framing device for the actual story. The crux of the story is that these two rival time travelers are very secretly communicating via letters to one another. It starts out as taunting one another, but gradually it turns into the two of them finding their soulmates in one another.
And I loved it! I normally tolerate-to-hate romance narratives because most of them are written in that “You know what this is like, we’re so relatable” kind of way. In this, the relationship grows and is very much about the characters, who are both very alien at first and grow familiar over the course of the narrative. Watching them open up to one another with increasingly strange methods of delivering letters and grow close was a delight and emotionally satisfying.1
It is weird, though. The time travel aspects are done in a very European manner, which is to say it exists without explanation. Besides knowing that Red and Blue are female, you don’t really know what they are, and the explanations are sparse and scattered. Red seems to be some kind of cyborg that has been rebuilt with technology, whereas Blue is an organic shapeshifting creature, I think? Both are creations of their factions, and what they are doesn’t really matter as much in the grand scheme of the narrative.
Overall, if you’re looking for a time travel book, this is not the one for you. The time travel is very secondary. But if you want a very weird story about two people finding one another and keeping their relationship a secret from their rival factions for fear of persecution, then this is definitely worth a read. It’s light, it’s quick, and it reads like reading poetry. Check it out.
- Also I cried. [↩]