Okay, so I know it’s only my second one of these but I’m already going to cheat a little bit. This book is coauthored by a woman and a man (Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone) but I just read it over Christmas break and I really liked it so shhhh. Forgive me. (And on good reads they say it’s by El-Mohtar so ha! Take that patriarchy!) Anyway here we go!

Spoiler alert! This book is about a time war! Two opposing generals begin to write each other letters. For this one I really just want to put quotes in because the writing is so beautiful! So I give you: ten quotes to make you go read this right now!!

1. “Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.” 
2. Words can wound—but they’re bridges, too … Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound? To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.
3. “Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.” 
4. Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened it so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? Sometimes I think that’s what I have instead of friends.
5. “Red’s letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her fingers’ tips, between the lines of her palms.” 
6. Alone. I want to tell you about when I learned that word, really, with all of me. The reason I’m a tumbleweed, a dandelion seed, a stone rolling until she’s planted in place, then kicked up again.
7. “I am more sensitive to your footsteps, I think, than anyone alive. (And everyone is alive, somewhere in time…)”
8. You say my letter found you in a moment of hunger. How to say what it means to me, that I might have taught you this- shared it, somehow, infected you with it. I hope it isn’t a burden at the same time that I want you seared by it. I want to sharpen your hungers fully as much as I long to satisfy them, one letter-seed at a time.
9. “I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.” 
10. “PS. I write to you in stings, Red, but this is me, the truth of me, as I do so: broken open by the act, in the palm of your hand, dying.” 

Anyway, it’s lovely, I read it out loud to myself on a beach because it’s not the kind of book that likes to stay on the page. Enjoy! 🙂

P.S.

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Look at these dorks! We love to see it.