Divine Rivals: A Novel (Letters of Enchantment, 1)
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.
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.
Shadow and Bone meets Lore in Rebecca Ross's Divine Rivals, an epic enemies-to-lovers fantasy novel filled with hope and heartbreak, and the unparalleled power of love.
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Community Reviews
Iâm writing to you but Iâm also writing for me. And I donât expect you to respond, but it helps to know someone is hearing me. Someone is reading what I pour onto a page. It helps to know that Iâm not alone tonight, even as I sit in quiet darkness.
The return of long dormant gods brings war back to the world. When her brother leaves to fight Iris' life falls apart. Having to juggle her emotions, an alcoholic mother, and the competition for a spot as a columnist in the Oath Gazette she is at her limit. In order to deal with her situation she begins to write letters where she pours her heart out. Unbeknownst to her, with the help of magic, these missives end in the hands of Roman Kitt, her rival at the paper. One day he answers back, without revealing his identity, and the two soon form a connection that changes their lives and follows them all the way to the frontlines.
This is first and foremost a romance, you can tell that everything else was built around the concept of these two exchanging letters. Because of that I found the worldbuilding to be a bit thin, like it didn't fully know what it wanted to be. You had these references to the mythology that were exciting but never went deeper than the obvious, and for that reason I didn't care at all for the war. It was clearly a devise used to cause tension and move the plot along. I found it interesting that the author was able to write these hard hitting, detailed war scenes that showed the horrors of war seemingly as easily as she did with the romance. My only complaint there is that the two rarely managed to coalesce in an organic way. You would be leaving the front after a horrible attack only to be dragged out of that mood and contemplation of the horrors by a silly scene that felt out of place.
The romance is the strongest piece of this book. The concept of magically exchanging letters was romantic, delightful, whimsical, I just wish there had been more letters. Iris' insistence that Roman was only her rival and out to get her plus the whole miscommunication also got on my nerves. And all that only for her to immediately forgive him for lying to her!! It made me go
This is one of the few books where I actually like the characters (Roman mostly) and where I actually like the relationship between them, and see it working.
I am usually not a big fan of books based in the war and olden times, but this was an exception.
Gives me no choice but to read the second book.
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