I don’t remember when I first heard about this book but I remember hearing very good things about it and I was not disappointed. Two time agents are at war. Red and Blue, a technical future and a natural future, incomparable with each other. They are the best at what they do, but when Red finds a letter on a bloody battlefield that read “Burn before reading,” we learn that there is more going on than we realize.
And thus begins a long journey up- and downthread, across time branches, into future pasts and past futures, with Red and Blue taunting each other, respecting each other as enemies and adversaries, and then more.
The book is told alternating from both Red and Blue’s perspectives, with each “action” chapter interleaved with a letter from one combatant to the other. It is a short read, a novella just under 200 pages, and my edition had several intriguing “book club” questions at the end that were interesting to read and think about. This is a book that grew slowly, and I really had no idea what was going on at first, but then, I figured it out, and could barely put it down. And then I found out that I didn’t know what was going on after all. The ending reveals so much, and it almost demands a reread with the new-found knowledge you gain in the last few chapters. I will definitely be rereading it.
In terms of what I learned from this book… well the two characters are so different and yet so similar. I want to reread it to see again how they are different from each other. I must admit that sometimes I forgot which side each player fought for. The mysticism made me think very strongly of a story I have been contemplating for some time that I have struggled to get on the page; it has similar themes of grief and revenge, though it is not a time travel story. If nothing else, this short work gave me hope that I could write that story and it would be well received.
I’m rating this five stars. It is not a genre I typically read but it gave me a lot of ideas and was extremely though provoking. I have NO IDEA how to classify this book. It is not space opera or hard SF. It has fantastical elements but it is not fantasy. Here be spoilers: at its heart, it is a love story.to read the spoiler, copy and paste. It’s hidden by this color. 🙂