2020/027: This is How You Lose the Time War -- Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Blue, as herself, cannot survive. Red, as herself, cannot reach her. But they have sprinkled bits of themselves through time. Ink and ingenuity, flakes of skin on paper, bits of pollen, blood, oil, down, a goose’s heart. [p. 179]

This is a difficult book to review: the prose is almost hallucinogenically vivid, the setting glittery with detail but hard to focus on, and the central love story -- of two soldiers on opposite sides of the eponymous Time War, each learning that they fit better with the other than with 'their' people -- as intricate and clever as a puzzle-box, and reliant on an innate understanding of chaotic cause-and-effect that may as well be magical.
( no spoilers )