Review: This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

A square crop of the cover of This Is How You Lose the Time War.

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
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Review: The Library of the Unwritten by A. J. Hackwith

A crop of the cover of The Library of the Unwritten by A. J. Hackwith.

There is no apology for my acts. We have a choice, all of us, in seeing the world and system we participate in. At some point, we are confronted with the cost. What suffers for happiness. What dies for life. Even Caesar couldn’t keep such a thing hidden, the blood that waters an empire’s soil. You have a choice. You can choose to close your eyes and enjoy your lucky position on the good earth. You can choose to walk away.

Or you can choose to rebel.

Librarian Poppaea Julia, 48 BCE

Chapter 41, The Library of the Unwritten
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