I had to think about which category this book belongs in before finally deciding on Romantasy. The romance is absolutely the central focus of the book, but do I call it a fantasy? Eventually I decided that the world-building is “fantastic” enough to count, but if I run into any more like this I may create a romance-SF category.
It’s a short book, just under 200 pages. Most of the story is contained in letters between the two protagonists. Even so, it’s incredibly densely packed. The prose is so beautiful and multi-layered. There are so many references to other legends, stories, poems, myths, I’m sure I barely caught a fraction them.
This book is a true enemies-to-lovers story. Red and Blue are the top field agents in a war between two futures, a war that takes place by changing the events of an uncountable number of possible alternative time streams to ensure that their future is the one that comes to pass. Many of those changes are brutal. And of course they must stop other agents who are trying to do the same for the opposing team. They’ve seen each other before, even admired each others’ work as they act to dismantle it. And that’s how it begins.
Both of them are considered anomalies in their own world. Red comes from a future based on computers, where people live suspended in a technological cloud and it’s considered very strange and somewhat suspicious to “decant” into a physical body. Blue comes from the The Garden where all organic life is bound into the hive mind. Their strangeness is the reason they became agents in the first place and it’s the initial source of what starts out as pure curiosity about each other.
I truly loved this book. There aren’t really any surprises or plot twists, just a slow beautiful journey that brings two people together despite everything.
Also, it is endorsed by Bigolas Dickolas