Title: Divine Rivals
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After centuries of sleep, the gods are warring again. But eighteen-year-old Iris Winnow just wants to hold her family together. Her mother is suffering from addiction and her brother is missing from the front lines. Her best bet is to win the columnist promotion at the Oath Gazette.
To combat her worries, Iris writes letters to her brother and slips them beneath her wardrobe door, where they vanish—into the hands of Roman Kitt, her cold and handsome rival at the paper. When he anonymously writes Iris back, the two of them forge a connection that will follow Iris all the way to the front lines of battle: for her brother, the fate of mankind, and love.
MY THOUGHTS
Divine Rivals was my biggest surprise this year. Why? Because I didn’t know or hear about this book until AFTER it came out! But even then, the synopsis didn’t really sound interesting. And it wasn’t until after being out for two or three weeks did I start seeing the book everywhere. As I scrolled through social media/Book Tok I kept seeing it mentioned repeatedly. The reviewers were glowing and raving about how much they loved the book and how it flew to be their favorite top five books read…EVER. Now I was intrigued! I am so, so glad that I took the chance because I ended up loving this book so much. Without a doubt a five-star read! This was my first time reading a book by Rebecca Ross despite owning three of her recent novels. Divine Rivals follows two young journalists tied together by a magical typewriter in a WWII-like setting. Except the war was among the gods. Upon starting Divine Rivals, I discovered it wasn’t as I expected and honestly the synopsis did a horrible job at capturing the book unless that was its intended purpose? But I guess it ended up being a good thing for me because I was pleasantly surprised at how the story unfolded.
Our heroine Iris’s brother is out fighting in the war, and it’s been months since she heard from him. In her grief she continues writing him letters knowing he wouldn’t hear from her. But someone else did. Iris ends up receiving replies to her letter via her closet from a mysterious person named Carver. What developed over the course of the book was a journey full of grief, love, and discovery. Divine Rivals is a historical fantasy, but it was very minimal on the fantasy aspect. At times I thought it lent more or was confused with its being magical realism. The war scenes were also kept to a minimum, but I didn’t mind. I was more focused on the main couple of the series. Readers were told of fantastical creatures and terrifying gods, but we didn’t see them until middle, end of the book. But in my opinion, it felt more like glimpses. The best part of the book were the main leads and reading their letters to each other. I normally don’t like the letter entry style, but it worked for Divine Rivals. The author also mentioned that the book was intended to be solely from the heroine’s POV but I’m glad she added in snippets of the male lead because it added another dimension to the story.
Divine Rivals is my first five-star review of the year, and it deserves all the hype and accolades it has thus garnered so far. I loved the enemies to lover trope without the male or female leads needing to be cruel or distasteful to one another which quite honestly is a breath of fresh air when this trope has been heavily exhausted and twisted in some books that I’ve seen. I think the book title sums up the overall feeling one can expect going into this book. I cannot wait until the next book; Ruthless Vows comes out! I need more Roman and Iris!
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