by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
This ended up on my TBR because of its time travel aspect. I have been looking everywhere for inspiration and frankly, there’s not a whole lot of time travel tropes surprisingly. I tried to dive into this one once before, but it was a little much for my spaced-out brain to comprehend at first, so I put it down. Then I picked it up a second time and finished it in about two days.
The story follows Red and Blue, two agents from competing agencies, fighting up and down the timeline. But then Blue breaks ranks and leaves a letter for Red to find. In the intervening historical interventions and time threads, they exchange their deepest feelings and experiences and slowly find a past and future in each other. Of course, there respective agencies would not want their best agents to go to the other side, so they are frequently thwarted by the other. There is not much else I can really say about the plot without beginning to sounds like the abstract nature of the text itself.
One reviewer called it “Poetry, disguised as genre fiction” and once I read that, I got it. I was being much too literal in my first attempt to read this story. If I read it, instead, as a work of abstract poetry within an epic poem, within a love ballad, then I was able to follow along. It was a beautiful way to describe with abstract nature of reality. I even understood more of what was happening as I read the reader’s guide at the end; it put a lot of the story in a more cohesive narrative for myself. Yes, a book should be able to stand on its own, but this one really felt like one I would have read in a college course, with a Professor to guide us through character and theme. One that, once fully analyzed, would become a favorite. It is a book I plan to read again someday, to find all the little secrets hidden in the taste of sumac seed.