This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar
Published 2019 · 57,475 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Science Fiction, Romance, Literary Fiction
How hard is This Is How You Lose the Time War to read?
This Is How You Lose the Time War scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 50 out of 100
- The prose is lush and image-heavy, with unusual metaphors, botanical and technological coinages, and poetic diction. It stays readable, sitting above Beach Read but below The Great Gatsby in difficulty of word choice.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Sentences are lyrical and sometimes long, with parallel structures and rhythmic cadences that mimic correspondence. They remain navigable, closer to The Great Gatsby than to Woolf.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- The letters ground feeling in concrete images, but the time war and its two opposed futures carry abstract ideas about order, growth and fate. It is more conceptual than The Road yet more grounded than Pedro Paramo.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- At novella length, each letter packs worldbuilding, wordplay and emotional turns, and the reader must absorb a war without exposition. It is denser than Beach Read and similar in compression to The Great Gatsby.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- The war, the factions and even the lovers' feelings come through oblique letters and fragments of mission scenes. Readers piece together events from hints, as in Flights but with a clearer through-line.
- Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
- Seeds, tea, rings of trees, gardens and machines carry meaning across the whole book, and the two factions work as rival philosophies. Symbols are more pervasive than in 1984, though less dense than in To the Lighthouse.
- Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
- Red and Blue taunt, tease and perform for hidden readers, so the gap between what they say and mean is wide in the early letters. The book grows sincere, closer to Flights than to Lolita.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- The love story reaches an emotional conclusion, but the war's outcome and the paradoxes of time are left open. It closes more than The Great Gatsby yet leaves the meaning of the ending to the reader.
- Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
- Alternating letters and interstitial mission vignettes jump across eras and braided timelines, and readers must track which letter answers which. It is more fragmented than Beach Read but far simpler than Flights.
How This Is How You Lose the Time War is regarded
This Is How You Lose the Time War holds a literary regard score of 50 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.