This book is brilliant. I feel like I read a long love poem about a futuristic war fought by time travelers. It took a minute to figure out just what was happening, but it was so easy to get swept up in it.

Red and Blue are agents on opposite sides of the Time War. Red belongs to the Commandment, Blue to the Garden. Red’s side is technological; Blue’s is organic and growing. They move through time as easily as we cross the street, going backwards and forwards, upthread and down, through the braids and threads of time. They make changes, change history, influence events, to move things in their favor.

At the labyrinth’s heart there is a cavern, and soon into that cavern will come a gust of wind, and if that wind whistles over the right fluted bones, one pilgrim will hear the cry as an omen that will drive him to renounce all worldly goods and retreat to build a hermitage on a distant mountain slope, so that hermitage will exist in two hundred years to shelter a woman fleeing with child in a storm, and so it goes. Start a stone rolling, so that in three centuries you’ll have an avalanche.

It begins as a bit of trash-talking, two agents taunting each other over wins and losses on the battlefield.

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.

But this correspondence becomes so much more than that. Red and Blue learn about each other, they share so much of themselves. They fall in love – a love that is a death sentence if it is discovered.

The writing is poetic and the story so inventive that I hated putting it down. It is one of those books that I feel I will carry around with me for a while, scenes and phrases replaying in my head, the best sort of earworm. It’s also one that I will be recommending to everyone.

My copy of This Is How You Lose the Time War came from the Summit County Public Library.