CBR18 Bingo: Refuge – Iris and Roman find refuge in their correspondence.
The days to come will only grow darker. And when you find something good? You hold on to it. You don’t waste time worrying about things that won’t even matter in the end. Rather, you take a risk for that light.
― Rebecca Ross, Divine RivalsLet us make our names exactly what we want them to be.
― Rebecca Ross, Divine Rivals
Iris Winnow and Roman Kitt are the same age and hold the same position at the Oath Gazette. From the outside, they appear to be on equal footing, but they carry their own unique traumas. Iris supports her ailing mother while holding a full-time job as a copyeditor at the newspaper. Their boss, the Gazette’s editor, set Iris and Roman up to compete against one another for the coveted columnist position. They are both strong writers, but Iris struggles to work and keep what’s left of her family, and her home, from collapsing.
The city of Oath is on the eastern border of a land ravaged by war. Two gods, Enva and Dacre, have called soldiers to fight for them on earth after centuries of silence. Iris’s older brother Forrest saw Enva in a dream and travelled west to enlist and fight in her army. Iris begged him to stay, but he could not resist his calling.
Roman’s family is nouveau riche and his father craves respect and power above all else. He believes he can obtain it by having a son as a newspaper columnist. He also pushes Roman into an arranged marriage, potentially aligning their family with the enemy. Roman wants nothing to do with this and resents Iris’s assertion that he will eventually get the columnist position via a bribe from his father rather than on his own merits.
As reporters, Iris and Roman crave to know what is happening in the west at the front, but they are forbidden to print anything against or in favor of either god.
As Iris’s situation eats away at her, she vents her frustration by writing letters to her brother on her grandmother’s heirloom typewriter. She begins collecting the letters and shoving them under the door of her closet, only to discover one day that the letters are vanishing.
After a couple of weeks, she receives a reply, This is not Forest. Iris continues to write and receive these enchanted letters. She does not know who is writing back, other than it is a man of about the same age as her.
With the shield of anonymity, Iris and the mystery letter writer share their fears, and their secrets, as well as any forbidden knowledge about what caused the ancient rift between the two gods in the first place.
Finally, Iris reaches a breaking point and, faced with nothing but bad options, she takes a job at a rival newspaper and travels to the west to be a war correspondent.
Iris and Roman’s eventual romance moved along at a steady pace and the supporting characters were interesting and not overused. This is a standard YA enemies-to-lovers romance with no real surprises. The use of magic in this world is just complex enough to serve the story. The history between the two gods and why they are at war is the ongoing mystery.
Even though the beats of the story were predictable, I really enjoyed it. However, for wanting an easy read, I had to choose a book set during wartime. I enjoyed the romance but was irritated by the predictable cliffhanger at the end.
I might read book two, but it is not at the top of my TBR pile as of yet.
CW for death in war, alcoholism, and an off-page description of the death of a child.
