This Is How You Lose the Time War is a love poem made into a novel.

The story centers around two Time agents from competing agencies who begin to fall in love through letters. The letters themselves are gorgeous, once Red and Blue begin to fall in love, but all throughout Amal El-Mohtar's prose is lyrical and gorgeous. The writing style does take a moment to get used to, the setting intangible and difficult to pin down, but once you start to understand the world that you're reading about and the characters within it, the whole thing melts into a luxurious, lovingly written tale of slow burning affection in the most unlikely of places.

Amal El-Mohtar's writing is superb. Her story is unique, unlike anything else that I've ever read. The only place where she falls short is in the coherency of what she writes -- the average reader will spend quite some time confused about what the heck is actually going on. I listened to this on audiobook, which also meant that there were moments when I was woefully confused in a way that I might not have been if I had the book in print in front of me. I could have gone back through the story more easily to decipher what I was reading. However difficult this book was to understand, at first, it quickly became one of the most beautifully written novels that I've read this year.

4-stars.