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

This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Gray Planet Commentary

• A unique take on a time travel love story

Gray Planet Indices

• Good Book Index: 95/100
• Literature Index: 93/100
• Magic Factor: 97/100

It has been years since I read a science fiction novella (or novel) that was as good in as many ways as This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

This is an immersive book–we are taken directly into a complex and unknown world with little expository explanation. I didn’t know who Red and Blue were, nor why they were fighting a war in time. The descriptions of action were fuzzy at best. I almost gave up, and would have if the book was longer.

Then, subtly, slowly, I was drawn in to this curious epistolary relationship between Red and Blue, two major players on opposite sides of a generations long, galaxy spanning war in time.

This Is How You Lose the Time War is all about love and erudition and language and poetry and the obsession that drives two people in love under impossible circumstances. El-Mohtar and Gladstone make the book complex and poetic, literary and romantic. Their collaboration is perfect, their words matched to the tone and setting. Red and Blue riff off each other with perfectly constructed styles using metaphors and imagery with cultural and literary references. This epistolary novel is as complex in structure as the time strands that Red and Blue traverse and manipulate in their generations long war over interstellar distances. Although the time war has little detail or explanation, it provides the connection between lovers, a challenge for them to overcome, and crucially, the structure for their redemption.

We feel deeply for Red and Blue and we feel their precarious situations amid the uncertainty they live in where time and worlds are mutable. They question their own motives and actions, and those of others, while regaling each other with romantic letters transmitted through subtle and abstruse steganography.

In alternating narrative strands and in the letters of Red and Blue, El-Mohtar and Gladstone build a world, they build lives, they build romance and they create magic. Read it.

Luster by Raven Leilani--A Review

Luster

by Raven Leilani

Gray Planet Commentary

• Edie, the first person narrator, is infuriating, angry, hopeless, apathetic and needy.
• Edie, the first person narrator, is honest, resilient, creative and sexual.
• The ending is transformative.

Gray Planet Indices:

• Good Book Index: 82/100
• Literature Index: 88/100
• Magic Factor: 40/100

I hated this book. In our time of coronavirus and hyper-partisan politics it came at me viciously using long sentences steeped in the cultural vernacular of a person fifty years younger than I, filled with references I didn’t understand, and the righteous anger of a young black woman struggling to find her place personally and professionally in a society that judges her based on her blackness and her gender and little else.

I loved this book. The driving force of Edie’s narration, her unique personality, viewpoint and language, slowly won me over, although it took time. By the last quarter of the book I was mesmerized by her inability to overcome her own choices while persevering as if she could. I was overcome with a sense of pre-ordained doom. I hoped for an epiphany. I savored every word, researched every confusing cultural reference. Because of the way Leilani builds this story and Edie’s character, the ending was satisfying for me, although I can’t tell you why.

Edie, the mid-twenties protagonist narrates in the first person, sometimes with a nearly stream-of-consciousness style that is immediate but difficult for me because it is steeped in the culture of her age group–forty-five years distant from mine. The challenges of Edie’s life, the way she lives it, and the cultural milieu she lives it in are not mine–she is an artist, I was an engineer; she is a passionate, young black woman, I am an older white man; I am privileged in many subtle ways, she is not. She is automatically suspect–by the police, by her employers, by the people she meets–I am automatically trusted.

Those differences are the theme, for me. Leilani had to bludgeon me with it and she almost knocked me out, but I withstood her blows and was given a small window into this life I will never know. I felt viscerally what it was like to be Edie, living with and acknowledging her faults and reveling in her fortitude and her insight.

I read a lot science fiction partly to feel the presence of the other and experience worlds I will never know. Raven Leilani, in Luster has given me the best of that in the familiar setting of my own world, but with a perspective alien to me–that of a young, black woman.

Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan Review

Friends and Strangers

by J. Courtney Sullivan

Gray Planet Commentary

• I loved the people in this book. I worried about them.

Gray Planet Indices

Good Book Index: 86/100

Literature Index: 85/100

Magic Factor: 90/100

I have rarely been as involved in a book as I was in Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan. This book immersed me in the lives of Elisabeth, a late-thirties new mother, married and now living in a small town, and Sam, a college senior who becomes Elisabeth’s babysitter. The book is told in alternating sections from Elisabeth’s point of view and then from Sam’s point of view.

Sullivan weaves a mesmerizing tale of the lives of these two women and how they become intertwined in a complex relationship where Elisabeth is employer, mentor and friend, and Sam is employee, friend and confidant. The boundaries of the relationship are blurred from both sides and become more complex as the story moves forward. Sullivan presents us with such detail of Elisabeth’s and Sam’s lives and thoughts that we feel we know them as well as we know ourselves—perhaps even better.

The time frame of their relationship is constrained by the fact that Sam will soon graduate and move on to a new, exciting and unknown future, while Elisabeth is established in her marriage and as a parent. Because of this, we know that the relationship will end soon, but at first we are convinced this will be a happy story of two women who are our friends.

Elisabeth is a lovable, but complex and infuriating woman. Sam sees her as having everything Sam dreams of. As their relationship deepens into one of friendship and shared confidence however, the secrets they share become burdens for Sam. Sam’s uncertainties about her future with her sort-of fiancee, Clive, and worries about her career after she graduates with a fine arts degree, put her on edge and open her to Elisabeth’s manipulations.

Elisabeth can’t face the reality of her own desires and ambitions and as a result cannot be honest with her husband, Andrew. Her guilt about her lies leads her to confide in Sam and then, in an attempt to control something in her life, a compulsion to try to save Sam from her youthful immaturity, but this leads her to more deception.

Sam’s life is expansive, the world is opening to her. She has her remote relationships, with the older Clive, with her roommate, Izzie, with her Latino friends she works with in the college dormitory kitchen, and a budding friendship with Elisabeth’s father-in-law that results in political activism. Elisabeth, by contrast has only her close focus on her family. Sam is Elisabeth’s only distraction, and so is one she cannot let go. All of this builds through the novel, with Elisabeth’s lies and deceits becoming more fraught and Sam becoming more uncertain about all aspects of her life.

We love them both and worry about them. How could this possibly end well? How can we not anticipate a devastating and emotionally difficult ending?

But then the book just stops and we are left with a few pages of description of Sam and Elisabeth ten years in the future. We have no idea how Elisabeth’s lies and deceptions were resolved with her husband, or if they even were. For Sam, we know more about how she ended up where she did and why. But the book was all about the relationship of Elisabeth and Sam, and the ending basically ignores that and gives us little resolution, particularly for Elisabeth.

This was a great novel, but it is diminished by the ending.

Blacktop Wasteland by S. A. Cosby Review

Blacktop Wasteland

by S. A. Cosby

Gray Planet Commentary

• Compelling, but ultimately a violent downer.

Gray Planet Indices

Good Book Index: 85/100

Literature Index: 75/100

Magic Factor: 60/100

Blacktop Wasteland by S. A. Cosby is a compelling book written with verve and immediacy. Cosby uses a realistic vernacular at times that immerses the reader in his characters and their culture. Over and over he provides imagery and similes like I have never read before–creative and perfect for his purpose. There is a lot to like here and I found myself forced to continue reading even after I realized that this was not a book for me.

There are no heroes in this book, despite what you may think in the first few chapters. There is revenge and anger and violent justice outside of the rule of law. If that’s your thing, you will love this book. But if you want something more, something that is revelatory about the human condition, and our ability to redeem ourselves despite our circumstances, look elsewhere.

Perhaps the meaning in Blacktop Wasteland is that redemption is not available to some, and I get that. But that view is so hopeless it makes me reluctant to recommend the book, particularly in today’s circumstances. In my old age and in this age of pandemic, I want at least a hint of the positive, a touch of hope that the world can be made better rather than the despair Cosby has given me.