This novel was all the rage a while ago, with rave reviews and an interesting premise. Took a while, but I was in the mood for something different.

What to Expect

A literary work on a sci-fi backdrop, telling a romance. It’s an epistolary novel, told in the exchange of letters between two operatives – known only as Red and Blue – from opposing factions fighting a war across time. Taunts turn to understanding turn to love, with the expected complications from their nebulous masters.

If a story is a window to another world, this book is one of those where the window is made of stained glass. The language is highly poetic, the structure is like an exercise in literary criticism.

What I liked

I did appreciate the flowery prose, though it took a conscious effort, as well as being drawn and curious to know the characters better. The story does draw you in, even while the structure forces you to pause and look at it by itself.

What to be aware of

As a time-travel novel, this suffers from all the expected paradoxes and holes as soon as you stop to think about events, same as (almost) every other time travel story. The descriptions is a bit more like comic’s multiverse, but the ‘mechanics’ of it aren’t really important.

The prose can come across as purple, so you really have to be in the mood for novel-length poetry – when the words themselves are just as important as their meaning – when you tackle this.

Felix’s Review

Felix gave up on the book. He didn’t mind the poetic prose (he’s probably more used to it than I), but gave up on the time-travel loopholes that just don’t make sense.

Summary

IF you’re in the mood for something different, highly literary and poetic like the works of Jorge Luis Borges, focused on romance with more fiction than science, then this might be your thing.

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Enjoying the reviews, but wondering who the heck is that Felix fellow? Glad you asked! He’s the protagonist of the Togas, Daggers, and Magic series, an historical-fantasy blend of a paranormal detective on the background of ancient Rome.

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