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

 

I read this in a coffee shop this afternoon. Like so many other people I owe bigolas dickolas wolfwood a deep debt of gratitude, this book is if anything better than he says. The alternating POVs, with alternating authorial voices, work shockingly well, and the interweaving of the stories bears some thematic weight come the finale. The idea of the eternal time war (or maybe Time War) probably owes something of a debt to Fritz Leiber's Change War (Snakes and Spiders) stories but that's not wildly important, this novel balances the vast scale of the war with the personal scale of the characters and is its own thing of beauty.