Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross – Review

Published: April 4, 2023

Publisher: Wednesday Books

Series: Iris at the Front #1

Genre: Fantasy, Romance

Pages: 368 (Hardcover)

My Rating: 5 Stars

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis:
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.

When two young rival journalists find love through a magical connection, they must face the depths of hell, in a war among gods, to seal their fate forever. Shadow and Bone meets Lore in this epic enemies-to-lovers fantasy novel filled with hope and heartbreak, and the unparalleled power of love.

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I never, in a million years, thought I would need a story about competing war correspondents falling in love. This is so vastly different from Rebecca Ross’s other books I’ve read, but it has firmly cemented her place as a favorite author. I’ll probably buy anything she releases at this point because this book was SO good.

Iris Winnow dropped out of school after her brother went off to war to fight for the goddess Enva. Her mother started drinking to forget, and after winning a writing competition, Iris is now working for one of the major newspapers in the city of Oath to pay the bills. One of Iris’s few joys is typing up her feelings on her grandmother’s old typewriter and sliding them under the closet door portal to her mysterious penpal. Roman Kitt works at that same newspaper and he’s Iris’s coworker and competitor for the single available columnist position. Roman is from a wealthy family, but just because the cage is gilded doesn’t make it any less a cage. He’s being forced to marry a woman he barely knows and doesn’t love to further cement his family’s new money position in society – yet another part of his life his father has dictated. Though Iris is his competition, he finds her letters to be both remarkable and comforting though she has no idea that he is the one receiving and responding to her innermost thoughts.

When Kitt gains columnist, Iris leaves and goes to the war front, hoping to find her brother and write about the horrors of war so that the citizens of Oath might send aid to their neighbor and fight against the god Dacre. There she finds new friends and a way to escape her past but then Kitt is right there with her because he’s fallen quite in love with Iris. Iris and Roman Kitt have the most wonderfully satisfying rivals to lovers romance, which creates some truly beautiful moments in this book. This is offset by the horrific losses suffered because Rebecca Ross never lets you forget that even though this is a love story, it’s set in the midst of a violent and terrible war.

I absolutely devoured this book and wouldn’t have guessed that I’d love a WW1-era fantasy story to such a degree as I do this one. The ending is really something else and I am dying for the sequel right now because this duology is meant to be binge read, one after the other. This is one of the best young adult fantasy stories I’ve ever read and also one of the best romantic fantasy stories. It’s fabulous, filled with lore and myth, love, the horrors of war, and friendship. It’s surprisingly hopeful for a story with such dark themes and I think it will appeal to a broad age range of readers.