I want to be a body for you.
I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious–I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction. I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.
Chapter 16, This Is How You Lose the Time War
I’ve had this book in my to-be-read pile for a while now. I’ve been hearing a lot of praise for it over the years its been out which put me off from reading it. There is a tendency for highly praised titles to result in disappointment for me due to mismatched expectations or me just not liking a thing that a lot of other people liked.
I am glad this was not a case of disappointment. In fact it was quite the opposite, I am ecstatic that I finally got around to reading this because its extremely my shit.
This is a book for the romantic poetry sickos amongst us. So many times throughout the book I found myself stopping to process a particular turn of phrase with reactions such as “oh my god that is so fucking romantic, what the hell”. Sure there is some sort of sci-fi plot in the background but I was never particularly interested or invested in that element.
This review of mine could just be a series of quotes I liked from the book and it would demonstrate my point. Here is another one.
Blue carries nothing with her between strands except knowledge, purpose, tactics, and Red’s letters. Memory is tipped and decanted into Garden, life to life to life, always deepening, thickening, growing new roots and efficiencies–but Red’s letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her fingers’ tips, between the lines of her palms. She presses them against her teeth before kissing her marks, reads them over when she shifts her grip on motorcycle handles, dusts soldiers’ chins with them in bar fights and barracks games. She thinks without thinking, often, of what she will name Red in her next letter–hides her lists in plausibly deniable dreamscapes, on the undersides of milkweed leaves, in shed chrysalis and wingtip. Vermillion Lie. Scarlet Tanager. Parthian Thread. My Red, Red Rose.
Chapter 10, This Is How You Lose the Time War
If you are sci-fi enjoyer who goes into this book expecting a lot of world-building and a coherent narrative about time travel, you are going to be disappointed. This is by all accounts a epic love story wrapped up in a sci-fi blanket. At 208 pages, the book is short and sweet which is good because I don’t think this book’s conceit will work in a longer book. The focus is on Red and Blue’s letters and the rest is ancillary.
This book is the best romance I’ve read in a long time. The last book I read that had good romance was The Beautiful Ones by Silivia Moreno-Garcia which I read two years ago. This book is making me think I need to read (more) romance novels. However, any other romance title is going to have a challenge on its hand matching up with this one as it sets a new and unreasonable standard of romance.
P.S – While searching for the cover for this book, I found this gorgeous fan art of the characters in this book by JP Bergamo. I love it.