Book Review: Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross

Title: Divine Rivals
Author: Rebecca Ross
Publisher: St. Martin’s Publishing Group
Publication Date: April 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781250857439

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.

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What a unique story! Divine Rivals is set in a late 1800s alternate universe where the gods are at war and the mortals are struggling and fighting to survive. Amid all of this Iris is a fledgling journalist, competing for a position as a columnist at a newspaper. Juggling the difficulty of her brother away at war and her mother who is struggling to cope with addiction, Iris has more on her plate that she can handle. She finds inspiration in a posting to work as a war correspondent. With little hope left, she leaves for war. Through all of this, Iris finds companionship in a mysterious writer whom she communicates with by leaving letters in her wardrobe.

I loved Iris as a character. She is determined to work through her struggles alone, though through her story, she learns to open up and let others in. As her world expands, so too does her ability to connect and build her own found family even as her own family falls apart. She experiences great tragedies but she does not allow these to hinder her. Instead, she confronts difficulty head on and manages to find a glimmer of happiness in a world that is otherwise chaos.

The one thing I really wanted more of is the magic of this world. Ross has built an incredibly unique story filled with the lore of the gods and the evil creatures that work for them. Despite having this incredible magical world, these fantasy elements take a back seat to Iris’s story line. I would love to see more interaction with the magic and the gods as it’s only touched on at a surface level in this book. There is so much more to unpack in this world, I can’t wait to find out what’s to come in book two.

Happy reading!