Divine Rivals

By Rebecca Ross

4/5 ducklings 🐣🐣🐣🐣

tl;dr Iris Winnow spent months spilling her guts to a stranger on the internet (the internet being magically connected typewriters). The strangers happened to be Roman Kitt, her journalistic rival. When Iris takes a job as a correspondent on the front lines of the war that killed her brother, she finds a surprising happiness there. When Roman Kitt follows, she finds love. What happens when her new life is threatened?

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What would you do if you found out you had spent months spilling your inner most thoughts a secret to your arch rival? Die of embarrassment? Fall in love? It’s a question for the ages.

Iris Winnow is a very good journalist. So is Roman Kitt. They’ve competed for the same stories for months, each trying to outdo the other and earn the top spot in the news room. But when Iris isn’t writing the news, she’s writing letters to her brother, who has been deployed to the front lines in a war between gods.

It isn’t her brother who writes her back. It’s Roman Kitt, though she does not know this. She spends months writing to the mysterious figure on the other end of her magical typewriter, telling him her deepest secrets, wish and regrets. Roman spends months writing back and falling in love.

When Iris suddenly quits her job at the newspaper to become a war correspondent, she finds herself thrown into a conflict she could never have imagined and a family she never thought she’d have again. Roman Kitt follows her, all in the hope of telling her who was really at the other end of her typewriter. What follows is a story of love blooming in the darkest of places and flourishing in spite of uncertainty and violence.

This was a rare entry in my Accidental Year of Queer Books, as a book helmed by two straight characters, but it had been on my list for months and the fancy struck, so I read it. I was pleasantly surprised to find one of the major side characters was queer, but it still doesn’t meet my (very official) qualifications as a queer book. And as a once-upon-a-time journalist, I had been dying to read this since it came out.

Regardless, I devoured this as an audiobook, the narrators passing the story back and forth with the letters immersed me in the story in a way I don't think simply reading it would have. Iris is stubborn to a fault, determined to do things her own way, Roman always thinks he knows best and I love their dynamic together, especially as Iris realizes that she is already in love with him.

This was such a fun read until the end. It was in the last quarter of the book that I felt like every bit of Iris’s character development was undone. She is a journalist who knows how to pursue a story and ask questions until she gets there, smart enough to change tact when she meets resistance, but persistent in getting what she wants and insatiable in her desire to understand. In the conclusion of the book, I felt she just went along without questioning anything, even as she knew something was off. She just shrugged and trotted off into the sunset.

Even still, I enjoyed Divine Rivals and can’t wait to pick up the sequel!

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