This Is How You Lose the Time War

My partner once described Westworld as "robots robotting at each other," and even though the characters weren't robots (well, maybe one was partially a robot) that's how I felt about this book. I can kind of understand why this book was so praised, but i found it to be a huge disappointment (especially as someone who loves time travel/alternate universe books.) The set-up sounded great - two agents of enemy factions in a time war fall in love. But for a short book, it ended up being a long slog with little pay-off. It felt overwritten; seemingly no sentiment could be expressed without multiple clauses and metaphors and tongue-in-cheek anachronistic pop culture references. Two-thirds of the communication betweeen the characters was just them saying "I love you" in various melodramatic ways - which I think was supposed to feel profound and emotional, but was mostly just tedious. And when I pulled away all of the baroque filler, I got two characters that I couldn't meaningfully distingusih from worlds I couldn't picture who were intensely in love with each for reasons I didn't understand. It was kind of cool that each chapter took place in a different time/universe, but you only got tiny snippets of time/place. The plot itself was decent, but so bare bone I wonder if this would have made a more satisfying short story.