Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

This Is How You Break Your Readers

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

by 3 Comments

I don’t think Faintingviolet had even finished this book before promising to hand it off to me. And at this point in our friendship, I don’t question her if she’s recommending a book. I just accept, and this book…..holy moly, this book….. Before we get to why I was utterly destroyed at the hands of This is How You Lose the Time War, we have to go back to my first book recommendation to Faintingviolet. I had read a book called The Illuminator that wrecked […]

“Keep Reading. Keep Writing. Keep Fighting. We’re all still here.”

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone

by 2 Comments

I was intimidated by this book, which feels like a strange thing to say about a book that measures no more than 7 inches tall and less than 200 pages. But I was. A book that inspires so many positive, nay gushing, reviews that also seems to leave the reviewer at a loss for how to describe the book (see please reviews by Aquillia, andtheIToldYouSos, carriejay, and emmalita as a place to start) had me putting it on and taking it off my to read […]

“Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein.”

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone

by 3 Comments

CBR 13 Bingo Square: Fauna This is How You Lose the Time War came highly recommended by Cannonballers and all sorts of ‘best of lists’, it’s even a staff pick at Mysterious Galaxy (where it completes a separate bingo square for their summer reading bingo!).  I’m happy to report that it lived up to all the hype.  This is a love story unlike any I have read before, due to the science fiction setting and non-human characters, but it contains classic elements; enemies to lovers, […]

As the Prophets Say, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone

by 4 Comments

I cannot explain this book. It is an enemies to lovers story divorced from time, place and humanity while also steeped in all three. Red and Blue are operatives in opposites sides of a time war. I don’t have any idea who the sides are or why they fight. I don’t know what’s at stake. There is no good guy or bad guy. None of that matters though. What does matter are the letters Blue and Red exchange. Initially it’s two enemies taunting each other […]

Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

by Leave a Comment

I feel like this is a good one for this group of readers for a handful of reasons. This is a short novel told in vignettes and letters and small conversations. It’s about two different soldiers or time travelers (though it’s more appropriate to say they are inter-dimensional travelers) of warring or competing factions. So they travel to different times and universes or threads of the same universe. They sometimes meet up and sometimes are able to communicate with each other. And they’re in love […]

Drop-kick That Magic Lamp into Mount Doom

The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin (editors)

by 1 Comment

Short story collections are like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: you have to gnaw some nuts and chews to eventually find that chocolate truffle. That said, The Djinn Falls in Love is phenomenal. Six of the twenty-one stories are among the best short stories I have read. Ever. (Jhumpa Lahiri, I’m sorry to report that you’ve been bumped.)  The editors’s international ensemble of authors clearly did their research, populating their confident tales with every manner of djinn, jinn, and genie. Some lie in wait in […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo