Verlorene der Zeiten

Sprachlich wunderschön und sehr herausfordernd. Inhaltlich irgendwie auch - so sehr, dass ich oft nicht wirklich folgen konnte und manchmal kurz davor war aufzugeben. Zwei allmächtige verfeindete Wesen, Vertreterinnen zweier verfeindeter Organisationen, die in einem Multiversum zwischen den Strängen und Zeiten hin- und herspringen, sich immer poetischer werdende Briefe schreiben und sich dabei trotz der Gefahr für sich selbst unsterblich ineinander verlieben. Das ist schon nicht so ganz das übliche Setting einer Erzählung. Trotzdem: Wer es über die Mitte des Buches hinaus schafft, wird mit noch ein paar wirklich interessanten Wendungen belohnt. Also irgendwie doch eine Leseempfehlung.

Oh, this book is so fun! It doesn’t take itself too seriously, which makes the unseriousness of it easier to take for this reader. <spoiler>And women who are in love but also kill each other — my favorite ❤️💙</spoiler>

Very enjoyable, quite romantic (even if I'm not that big of a fan of the enemies to lovers trope) and tells us a very important lesson: you win the time war by not writing about paradoxes, meeting your grandparents or much of the details of time travel in general.

Even in the flaws it grows stronger. This is a book that is going to stay with me for a long, long time.

Worth reading but I wasn’t up on all the literary references as much as you need to be. The quality of the writing was obvious and superb, but, oddly for a novella, I felt it a little too long. I wanted the story to move on from the love letter correspondence between Red and Blue one or two letters earlier. The immersion that was achieved for the diverse locations with such brief descriptions was my highlight. There’s a mystery character appearing at the end of each letter, and although readers (esp. any fantasy/SF reader) would spot who that is, when we actually meet them, for the end game, I got more into the romance of it.

Quirky and unexpected, the things I appreciate most in a book. Also, not that long, which means it can't get too lost in it's unique abstractions. Loved it, will read it again.

How do you have a love story between two beings separated by war, time and dimensions? With covert letters. They may be written in seeds or lava flows, but letters nevertheless.

I love this book so much. Just gorgeous in execution, and a story delightful in its telling.

The letters that make up about half of this book are gorgeously written, and I love the story they tell. The basic idea of the time war is clever, and the descriptions of placetimes the characters find themselves in evocative, sometimes reminiscent of Calvino's Invisible Cities. I devoured this book in a few days.

And yet... something about it felt a little thin or hollow behind its fireworks. I think it was a good artistic choice to leave all technical details out, but I couldn't help but get hung up on the time paradoxes. Not that it's the authors' responsibility to necessarily avoid or solve them, but for me personally they intruded on the suspension of disbelief.

it's a magical realist (?) romance in a science fiction Time War setting, an unusual choice, but one that works well, given how strange the consequences of warping causality would be. If you can get ahold of the audio book, it's pretty good, has different readers for Blue and Red.