There is a magical link between you and me. A bond that not even distance can break.
Divine Rivals
by Rebecca Ross
Genre: YA Fantasy
About: Iris promised her brother she would stay in school while he fights in the war raging between two gods. But as her mother turns to drink, Iris is forced to drop out and find work. Wanting her words to matter, she becomes a writer for a newspaper. Only her place there is not certain. A rival reporter with money, looks and - worse - talent, is fighting for the same editorial position as her. She hates him but she can't look away. Yet as the war seeps further into her life, so too does her rival.
Thoughts
I wanted to love this book. I expected to. This is my first Rebecca Ross novel but I've heard so many excellent things about her writing and Divine Rivals in particular has been heavily hyped.
But unfortunately this wasn't for me. While I loved the emotion on the page - Ross has an exquisite writing style for expressing character feelings, and I very much enjoyed the romance of the book, there were so many elements to the story that I found disengaging.
The setting was one of them. The story is set in our world, though it isn't modern day, with the addition of some fantasy elements. The way we're told about the magic system is, well, by being told. Iris gets her information by asking for it. We read about the legends of the gods alongside her. Pages and pages of myths are given to us about gods we've yet to meet in a war that I never felt much of a connection to. Even when we're on the frontlines, the focus is on listening to the soldiers tell their stories. An entire platoon is killed but the way we're asked to care about it is by a soldier telling us the story of how he knew those men and women. We don't know them and we will never know them. And it's this way for many of the character relationships. The only relationship we're really experiencing is between Iris and Roman; everyone else is a fireside story and, ultimately, background fodder.
The magic also didn't really make sense to me. Iris finds out about her magical typewriter, again by being told its story origin, but it left me with so many questions. Why did Roman receive only Iris's letters? Why not every article or story she'd ever written on the typewriter? Why did the letters have to be placed in a wardrobe? Did copies of those letters also appear in the museum with the third typewriter? Had Roman never written any letters on his typewriter before receiving Iris's?
But beyond being unsure about the magic system, I just felt a lot of disconnect overall with the story. The war between the gods is the catalyst for the story but neither Dacre or Enva were ever present. Discounting the epilogue, we don't encounter them once and are just told of the impact they have to the world and the characters without ever seeing them exert that power themselves.
And while Iris and Roman had a sweet relationship, as individual characters they were sort of boring. Iris's personality is writing, and Roman's personality is loving Iris. All the characters around them actively put the two of them in the spotlight, as if they know Iris and Roman are the main characters. Attie gets no storyline, becoming best friends with Iris instantly. Marisol is another instant relationship, this time as a motherly figure to Iris, and that's pretty much the extent of the other characters we interact with. Strong bonds are formed, but I didn't feel the strength of them as no one seemed to really matter beyond the two main characters.
Overall, this was a beautiful romance but it was set in a world that didn't feel real to me, with magic I didn't understand, and too many characters falling into the background.
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