Colleen Mondor Reviews Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross

Divine Rivals, Rebecca Ross (Wednesday Books 978-1-250-85743-9, $18.99, hc, 368pp) April 2023.

Divine Rivals, first in the new Letters of En­chantment series from Rebecca Ross, takes a bit of inspiration from rivals-to-romance epistolary romcoms like You’ve Got Mail and a lot of WWI research (including trench warfare, grenades, and poison gas) to craft an exciting adventure about Iris and Roman who are destined to be together forever if they can survive their Hemingway/Gellhorn competitive instincts and dangerous experiences at the warfront.

Positioned against each other for a newspaper columnist position by their editor, the two are actually close friends (although Iris doesn’t know this) who take solace in late night-letters trans­mitted via linked magical typewriters (!!!). Iris is sending her letters into the void, wishing they could reach her brother, who is off at war. Roman unexpectedly receives the letters (the typewriters have a great history, which is part of the book’s fun), and quickly deduces they come from his office rival but, of course, keeps that information to himself. When he responds anonymously and reveals that he is not her brother, Iris keeps writ­ing anyway. They could have gone on this way for ages, but then a tragedy at home sends Iris off to the front to find her brother via a war cor­respondent position. Roman, fleeing some painful personal issues of his own, follows her and then they both nearly die multiple times. Things get quite dicey, leading to an abrupt ending that has both a cliffhanger and, well, a twist that really comes out of nowhere, and not necessarily in a good way. We shall have to wait and see if Ross pulls things together and makes that twist work in the next book.

Throughout the narrative, Iris and Roman have a romantic tension that is quite enjoyable to fol­low. Their wardrobe and snappy 1930s dialogue and attitude fits well with Ross’s descriptions of the news office. Roman comes from serious money and carries guilt over his little sister’s death years earlier, so feels honor bound to do everything his domineering father wants him to do. (This includes marrying a woman he barely knows and producing an heir.) Iris and her mother are strug­gling in every way imaginable with her brother gone to war, and the difference in her social status from Roman’s is something she worries about. (His father can buy the promotion for him at work and probably will.) What makes all of this drama more intense is the war, which is where the fantasy worldbuilding comes in.

The war is about two gods who recently ‘‘woke up’’ and are now trying to get back at each other by killing as many mortals as they can. Dacre ap­parently loves or was obsessed (in a Hades/Perse­phone kind of way) with Enva a long time ago. She escaped his clutches by putting him, his followers, and the other gods to sleep with her music. He is now awake and started killing a ton of mortals because that is apparently what Dacre does, and so Enva started entrancing other mortals to fight him (and his followers, who might be willing but I’m not sure?) and… well, I really don’t know. The gods were the least developed part of the plot, which is a problem because they are the only reason for the war, and that is a big part of everything else that is going on. The questions surrounding the gods (which Roman and Iris are trying to sort out through some half-hearted research), get even more confusing when her brother appears. It really seems, in the end, that this war will not be over until everyone everywhere is dead, which makes the romance a bit difficult to get excited about. While the reasons behind WWI are frustrating, they are still easily understood (treaties, alliances, dying empires, assassination). As Ross goes deeper into her series, hopefully the reasons for her war will also become clearer.

This review and more like it in the May 2023 issue of Locus.

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