Divine Rivals — Letters of Enchantment, Book One

A Love Story Typed in Secret

Rebecca Ross’s Divine Rivals takes one of fiction’s oldest devices — two people who fall in love through letters without knowing each other’s identity — and gives it a fresh, magical engine. Iris Winnow and Roman Kitt are rival junior columnists competing for a single coveted promotion at the Oath Gazette. They are also, unknowingly, connected by a pair of enchanted typewriters: when Iris slides a letter under her wardrobe door, it materialises not for her absent brother, as she intends, but for Roman. What begins as anonymous correspondence becomes a confessional, then a courtship, all while the two snipe at each other in person across the newsroom.

It is a premise built for swooning, and Ross delivers on it. But what elevates Divine Rivals above a charming gimmick is the larger story it is wrapped around: a war.

Romance With the Weight of a War Novel

The world of the book is in the grip of a conflict between two resurrected gods, Enva and Dacre, whose ancient feud has dragged ordinary mortals to the front. Iris, desperate for news of her enlisted brother, eventually leaves the newsroom to become a war correspondent — and the novel transforms, in its back half, into something closer to a story about journalism, conflict, and grief than a standard romance. Ross writes the front with restraint and real feeling: the boredom and terror of the trenches, the civilians caught between gods, the way war hollows out the people who survive it.

This dual identity is the book’s great strength. The romance gives the war stakes; the war gives the romance weight. Readers who want only the love story may find the wartime passages a swerve, but they are what make the emotional payoff land as hard as it does.

Iris and Roman

Both leads are carefully drawn. Iris is fierce, ambitious, and quietly broken by a difficult home life; Roman is buttoned-up, privileged, and trapped by family expectation, with more tenderness beneath the surface than his rivalry with Iris suggests. Their in-person antagonism and their on-paper intimacy create a satisfying dramatic irony — the reader knows what they don’t — and Ross paces the convergence of the two relationships with patience. When the truth finally surfaces, it is earned.

Prose That Punches Above the Genre

One of the clearest pleasures of Divine Rivals is simply the writing. Ross has a lyrical, controlled style that gives the book an atmosphere — rain-soaked cities, the hush of a newsroom at night, the grey dread of the front — that much romantasy lacks. She trusts silence and implication, and the result reads less like a trend-chasing genre entry than like a literary historical fantasy that happens to have a knockout romance at its core.

A Matter of Heat

Prospective readers should calibrate expectations on one point: Divine Rivals is comparatively low on explicit content. The romance is intense but largely emotional and slow-burning, closer to longing than to spice. For many readers this is a feature — the restraint makes the connection feel deeper — but those arriving from the steamier end of the romantasy shelf should know that the book’s intimacy lives mostly in its letters.

That Ending

It must be said plainly: Divine Rivals ends on a cliffhanger engineered to wreck you. Ross spends the novel building affection and hope and then closes on a turn so cruel that finishing without the sequel, Ruthless Vows, on hand is genuinely inadvisable. It is a calculated move, and an effective one — the duology is designed to be read as a single emotional arc, and the first book’s gut-punch finale is the hinge.

Where It Stands

In a crowded field, Divine Rivals distinguishes itself through craft and emotional ambition. It is more interested in tenderness and consequence than in spectacle, and its fusion of a charming epistolary romance with a sober story of war is unusual and effective. For readers who want romantasy with a literary sensibility and a heart that genuinely aches, it is among the strongest the recent wave has produced — and a deserving editor’s pick.

The Duology as a Whole

Divine Rivals is the first half of a two-book story completed by Ruthless Vows, and the two are best understood as a single arc split at its most agonising point. The debut establishes the romance, the magic of the enchanted typewriters, and the human cost of the god-war; the sequel pays off the cliffhanger and carries Iris and Roman through the conflict’s escalation toward resolution. This structure is central to the reading experience: Divine Rivals deliberately withholds catharsis, ending on loss rather than triumph, and readers who stop there will feel the absence keenly. The duology format also lets Ross deepen her themes — the way war scatters and reunites people, the courage of bearing witness through journalism, the persistence of love across separation — without the bloat that afflicts longer series. It is a tightly controlled two-book emotional engine rather than a sprawling saga, which is part of why it has been so widely embraced: the payoff is finite, earned, and within reach. For anyone moved by the first book’s blend of tenderness and devastation, the sequel is not optional — it is the other half of the heart.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — A beautifully written, emotionally devastating rivals-to-lovers romantasy whose wartime backdrop gives its charming epistolary romance real and lasting weight.

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