Now That’s What I Call a Breakdown

I’ve had This Is How You Lose the Time War recommended to me by at least five different friends, all with slightly glazed-over eyes and varying degrees of emotional devastation. Now I understand why. It’s tender and brutal and exquisitely weird. Like someone bottled longing and poured it into a pocket universe made of postcards and weaponised metaphors.

Here’s the full review:

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – “Your Love Is a Weapon / My Love Is a Letter”

This book is basically two war criminals falling in love via increasingly deranged letters across collapsing timelines, and if that sentence makes you feel feral and overwhelmed, congratulations: you are the target audience.

Reading This Is How You Lose the Time War is like watching a piece of performance art in a dream you don’t fully understand but emotionally, it knows you. It’s lyrical, elliptical, and laced with hunger. Red and Blue are rival agents in a war that spans centuries and species and branches of time, and somewhere between battlefield sabotage and found poems, they start writing each other letters. And then it’s all over for them. And us.

The prose is maximalist, metaphor-dense, and deeply indulgent in a way that might not be for everyone. There were moments I had to reread a paragraph twice just to parse what dimension I was in, but the feeling was never unclear: longing, defiance, devotion, destruction. If you like stories that come at romance sideways, where plot is less important than vibe, this one sings.

It lost a star for me only because I sometimes wanted a little more grounding, a little more shape beneath the language. But even then, it felt intentional, ;ike trying to pin a butterfly with a love letter instead of a needle.

📖 One-liner summary: A queer, cosmic epistolary fever dream about love, war, and the way language can undo a person - gloriously.

If you've read it and want to scream about “burn before reading” or *“I love you in this letter because it will be the last” - *I am HERE and I am NOT OKAY.