In my quest to check off more titles on my reading challenge at the last minute, I’ll add this one for my alliterative author pick. It was also the book club selection for Read Between the Wines this month, chosen by me. I did a bit of double dipping, as you can see. Having been feeling a lot of weight in the things I was reading and experiencing, I decided a nice YA title would be a good choice. It wasn’t exactly light, but I certainly could have chosen worse. And a good fantasy is able to pull me out of the overwhelming nature of reality.

Divine Rivals follows Iris Winnow, a young journalist who finds herself battling the conflicting emotions of her rivalry with a fellow journalist from the other side of the tracks, as they used to say. Iris, with her off-to-war brother and substance-addled mentally absent mother, struggles to keep afloat under the mental load that comes with being the lone breadwinner of the family. Roman Kitt, conversely, enjoys a privileged moneyed life but lacks the freedom and independence he desires due to his controlling family. While the two clash on a professional level, they find themselves drawn to one another by threads they never knew existed and will have to choose between what is expected by the outside world and what they want for themselves.

I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that Iris and Roman find themselves corresponding magically through their typewriters, two devices that have a shared history that left them connected permanently. They are like little teleportation devices for the written word. Old-timey email, if you will. This is essentially a war novel, but there’s a twist. Taking place in the mid-to-late 1910’s, the novel proposes an alternate history in which the mythologies of Gods and Goddesses have a basis in fact and the two warring Gods have returned to wage their war, pulling humans into the line of fire. Iris and Roman join the soldiers at the front as war correspondents, an act that pushes the novel to its dramatic cliffhanger of a conclusion.

What I like about this is the clever conventions Ross uses to set up her narrative. I liked both Iris and Roman and thought they had good chemistry that was fraught with just a bit of angst. It’s certainly a passionate relationship, and I even thought maybe things progressed rather rapidly once they reached the front. Like I said, this is a first book and it has quite the cliffhanger, so be prepared to not have ultimate satisfaction, but that’s something to be expected with this genre so I don’t see that chasing anyone away.

Interestingly enough, more than one of our book club members said they found themselves pulled in more to the story when they read the physical book than when they listened to the audio. I didn’t have any issues with the audio, but that’s food for thought if you’re looking into this book and trying to decide which format to choose. Overall, I found this to be an engaging and enjoyable read and look forward to the second installment.

Published April 4, 2023 by Wednesday Books. ISBN 9781250857439. Runtime 10hrs 50mins. Narrated by Rebecca Norfolk and Alex Wingfield.