This is How You Lose the Time War

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (2019) 209 pages

I listened to the audiobook on Libby narrated by Cynthia Farrell and Emily Woo Zeller. Amal answers a reader's question on Goodreads about how the two authors divided the writing with "In brief, Max wrote all of Red and I wrote all of Blue." I struggled to follow the story and understand what was really happening in the early chapters of the book. It is a very abstract book with lots of poetic language and mind-bending multi-verse time jumps. The two main characters named Red and Blue are female time agents from two warring factions. If you are a fan of espionage stories, I wouldn't recommend this because the spy work of these two time agents is left pretty vague, or, at least, it is difficult to follow the thread of the consequences of their actions forward and backward through time. There are letters that Blue and Red send to each other in this short book, which start as taunts between competitors and turn into proclamations of love. Red's world includes many more references to human civilizations throughout history and has a sci-fi bent. Blue's world has many references to plants and animals and has a fantasy angle. Ultimately, I think this is really talking about the competition between humanity and nature through the millennia, and a star-crossed couple representing these two things begins to see value in each other.

 

Sadness is a White Bird

Sadness is a White Bird by Moriel Rothman-Zecher, 274 pages.

The title gives it away that this is, ultimately, a sad book. Nimreen and Laith, Palestinian twins (adults, of course), and Jonathan, an Israeili man, become friends, close friends, more than friends, and then it all goes terribly wrong.

The decent proposal

The decent proposal / Kemper Donovan 309 pages

Richard is a good looking but broke producer, Elizabeth is a hard working attorney who is going places but is a little light on personal relationships and not interested in breaking her rigid schedule.  Richard and Elizabeth have never met but an unknown benefactor wants to pay them each $500,000 to get together and talk for two hours a week for the next year.  At first they are a little unsure but Richard is broke so needs the money and Elizabeth figures the hourly rate is much higher than the firm is paying her so they decide to give it a try.  They start getting to know each other slowly, she is a little worried he is too shallow, he is a little worried she is no fun.  They turn their time together into discussions about books and movies and slowly start seeing each other's good points.
In the end the benefactor decides to meet them...turns out there is a connection but it isn't obvious.

I thought this would be kind of a mindless romance but it was more than that.  There aren't many characters but each is interesting in their own way.

One Plus One / Jojo Moyes 368 pages

My third Moyes read, following the terrific Me Before You and the not-terrific-but-still-good The Girl You Left Behind.  One Plus One falls into the latter category.  It's the story of Jess, a fine young woman whose life has jumped the tracks, with a lousy job, a damaged stepson, and a math-genius daughter.  At a desperate turning point in her life she meets Ed, a wealthy software whiz who's made some incredibly dopey decisions.  Incredible is the word here - the plot is so implausible that the book should stink, but Moyes creates believable characters with excellent dialogue and interior voices so that the plot hardly matters.  She's cranking them out very quickly these days - we have Silver Bay and The Ship of Brides yet to come in 2014 alone -  and I worry that my favorite light pleasure reads may lose their appeal.  We'll see.