REVIEW: Divine Rivals

By Denise @ Life With No Plot on February 13, 2025 • ( 0 )

About the Book

Title: Divine Rivals

Author: Rebecca Ross

Series: Letters of Enchantment #1

Genre: YA Fantasy

Pages: 357

Edition Read: Kindle eBook

Dates Read: February 4 – 10, 2025

Blurb: All eighteen-year-old Iris Winnow wants to do is hold her family together. With a brother on the frontline forced to fight on behalf of the Gods now missing from the frontline and a mother drowning her sorrows, Iris’s best bet is winning the columnist promotion at the Oath Gazette.

But when Iris’s letters to her brother fall into the wrong hands – that of the handsome but cold Roman Kitt, her rival at the paper – an unlikely magical connection forms.

Expelled into the middle of a mystical war, magical typewriters in tow, can their bond withstand the fight for the fate of mankind and, most importantly, love?

Review

I really, really liked this one. Honestly, I was sold as soon as I heard “magical typewriters.”

It’s very much a classic enemies-to-lovers story, which of course means that everything hangs on whether or not you want to root for this couple. Let’s start with Iris. She is a fighter. Her brother is off to war, she loses her mother, and still, she is trying her best to find her place. The job at the Oath Gazette doesn’t work out and, since she wants to find news of her brother, she signs up to go right into the middle of the war zone.

Now let’s look at Roman. He’s from a rich family, he’s smart, talented and attractive. On the outside, he has everything – except freedom. He is told that he has to do well in his work, but also that he has to enter an arranged marriage to a woman who has no use for him whatsoever. He’s also the first one who realizes that his typewriter is connected to another typewriter that lets him send and receive messages. When he realizes those messages are coming from his rival at the Gazette, he is immediately intrigued and, through her words, falls in love.

She falls in love with him, too. It just takes a while to find out exactly who was writing to her.

They fall in love in the midst of a world that is falling apart, mostly due to two gods who had a really bad break up. If there was anything I would want more from this story, it would be to hear more about the gods and how we got into this mess. It does seem like this will be covered in book two, so I can be patient. Overall, I just loved the aesthetic and atmosphere of this story world. It felt like WWII America, just with gods as the instigators instead of countries. I’m very much looking forward to seeing where this story takes us.

GoodReads rating: 5 stars