So many different people recommended this book to me that I think it was a victim of its own success. The book is fine, certainly, but after all that hype I definitely expected… a little more.
The book is pretty straightforward, opposing factions of Garden and the Agency (nature versus technology) start up a correspondence. The two send each other letters back and forth through various creative mediums across time and space. Eventually they fall in love, Red (of the Agency) is told to poison Blue (of the Garden). Red warns Blue, but she is poisoned anyways. Red goes back in time and infiltrates Garden to get her an antidote, and the book ends with Blue getting Red out of jail.
There’s a lot to like here, the take on time travel is refreshing in its simplicity and lack of drawn out explanations. Nature vs tech is basically a trope so you really don’t need a ton of explanations to get the dynamic. There is no ethics of what they’re doing either, the entire focus is on the relationship between these women as they develop a fondness for each other separate of their factions.
But that’s also my biggest issue: I don’t feel like I get to know either of them very well. The only characters we meet are basically husks you can project whatever you’d like onto. They don’t have distinctive personalities, and you’d be forgiven for mixing them up.
After all that I just expected… more. A deeper connection.
More of character development rather than a single relationship. It is good and
it’s at least a quick read, but I do feel I just wanted to speed through it
after a certain point.
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