Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross

My Rating: 🟊🟊🟊🟊🟊

Spice Rating: 🫑

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?

My Review:

My flabbers are truly gasted, I am still sitting in the quiet aftermath of this book, a little undone, a little softer than I was before I turned the first page. I went into this story almost blindly, the way I often do, guided only by the whisper of its presence everywhere I looked. I didn’t read the blurb. I didn’t prepare myself. I simply stepped into it, and somehow, it became everything I didn’t know my heart had been aching for.

There was a feeling that wrapped itself around me as I read, something delicate and almost forgotten. At the time, I couldn’t name it, and even now it slips through my fingers when I try to hold it too tightly. But if I had to try, I would call it this: the quiet, aching wonder of first love. Not just romance, but that deep, consuming yearning, the kind that feels both fragile and infinite all at once. The kind that lingers in your chest long after the moment has passed.

This story carries a love that feels rare in books now. It is not loud or forceful, but steady, achingly so. There is something profoundly beautiful about a man who loves without trying to possess, who chooses not to stand in the way of the woman he loves, even when it would be easier to ask her to stay. Instead, he follows. Not to control, not to change her path, but simply to be near her, to exist in the same world she does. And there is something so deeply moving about that kind of devotion, it feels selfless, reverent, almost sacred.

The love in this book feels timeless. It is soft and fierce in equal measure. It is the kind of love that doesn’t demand but gives. The kind that grows quietly, like roots beneath the surface, unseen but unbreakable. It made my chest ache in the best way, like remembering something you didn’t realize you had lost.

And now, I find myself hesitating at the edge of the second book. Not because I’m uninterested, but because I am. Because I don’t want this feeling to end. I want to linger here a little longer, in this fragile, beautiful space that this story created inside me.

All I can say is this: read it. Let yourself fall into it the way I did without expectations, without armor. Let it surprise you. Let it remind you what it feels like to yearn, to hope, to love in a way that feels both tender and endless.