This Is How You Lose the Time War

Took me a bit to come around to this. The early chapters are saddled with a lot of overcomplicated scifi world building and inexplicable pop-culture references, but once it shifts into being an earnest villains-to-lovers romance I was all in. I do not read enough violent and vulnerable love poetry so perhaps I am just starved for intimacy, but the way Red and Blue's brovado gets shelled as they realize they are falling for each other made me yearn for a similar connection the way all great romances do.

I am not particularly interested in picking apart the time travel for inconsistencies as the emotional impact works regardless of if I can make sense of the strands and ripples. The impression I get from talking with others is the stylistic moves and flowery ambiguity are fully love/hate, but I'm glad to fall in the former. Irrelevant in some ways, but the cover is one of my favorites of the last decade so I'm glad the book lived up to it (if not in ways I expected).