I chose this book based on popularity and on its genre. It tells the story of two agents, red and blue, fighting across time and worlds as part of an ongoing war between their two organizations. As they dip in and out of time, they begin a correspondence. Through this correspondence, we learn bits and pieces about who they are, what and how they are made, and the role they and their kind play. As their flirting develops into deeper feelings, they must each decide if continuing is worth the eventual fallout.
At the half-way mark, I continued to push through the book because it is famous, it is short, and I suspected there had to be some great twist, some great story to make me care. I can’t even say it’s beautifully written. It’s as if someone grabbed a thesaurus and paged through a year’s worth of National Geographic magazines and just described what they saw on each page. I can go into more detail, but you can probably tell that his book really didn’t do it for me. Wading through the prose was like doing homework. Don’t get me wrong. There were definitely parts that I loved. The scene in the cafe with the tea was delightful. The letter on the ice was fascinating. I wanted more of that. Other than that, the rest of the book bored me.
The good: Learning the delivery method of each letter was a delight. The phrasing in the letters is beautiful.
The bad: I just couldn’t believe the love story. A friendship that leads to infatuation? Yes! Definitely! But to me, the letters felt hollow, lacking, like eating a turkey sandwich with every possible condiment added but no turkey. And maybe that was the point all along. We fill in the blanks as we go and end up with something that is mostly fantasy.
Final point: If this is your jam, I recommend Star Trek Discovery, Season 2 specifically. That was 10x better than what the authors were trying to do in this story.
