Showing posts with label just a hint of fantasy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label just a hint of fantasy. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 24, 2023

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.

 

Wednesday, June 26, 2019

Time After Time

Time After Time by Lisa Grunwald, 401 pages

On December 5, 1925, Nora Lansing was on the final leg of a trip home from a long trip abroad when the subway train she was on crashed just before the platform at Grand Central Station. Several years to the day later, rail worker Joe Reynolds found Nora trying to find someone to walk her home from the station. When he obliges, they get no more than a couple blocks before she disappears into thin air. But something about Nora has captivated Joe, and when he finds her again the next December 5, the two strike up an unlikely romance.

Billed as a readalike to The Time Traveler's Wife, Time After Time is a complicated romance that spans years and strange complexities that can't be explained elsewhere. But unlike Niffenegger's groundbreaking novel, this book is limited by place, with almost everything taking place within a block or so of Grand Central and thus limits the protagonists' experiences (though the intrusion of World War II into their lives certainly livens things up). Perhaps because of that, or maybe because of the book's reliance on the quirky (but real) Manhattanhenge phenomenon, I wasn't quite as taken with this book. Certainly, I loved all the info about Grand Central during the war, and the inner workings of the terminal, but I just wasn't totally able to warm up to Nora and Joe like I did with Time Traveler's Wife's Henry and Claire. That said, for those that aren't quite as smitten with Time Traveler's Wife as I am (it's one of my all-time faves) and don't mind getting Cyndi Lauper earworms, this is a good read.