Divine Rivals

Divine Rivals is the first half of Rebecca Ross's Letters of Enchantment duology, published in 2023 by Wednesday Books in the United States and Magpie in the United Kingdom. It places a war between gods inside a world that otherwise resembles the middle of the twentieth century, with newspapers, rationing and a front line that families read about rather than see. Ross has said the idea came partly from the film You've Got Mail and the play The Shop Around the Corner.

Iris Winnow is eighteen and competing for a columnist's position at the Oath Gazette, the city newspaper, while the war takes her brother to the front and her mother out of the house. Roman Kitt is the rival she is measured against, an heir with a desk and, she assumes, an advantage. What joins the two of them is a typewriter: Iris has been writing to her missing brother and posting the letters under her wardrobe, and something other than the postal service has been delivering them.

Ross writes the book in chapters that alternate between narration and the letters themselves, so the courtship happens partly on paper and partly in an office where neither party knows who the other is. The gods are the reason the war exists: two of them, Dacre and Enva, have woken and taken sides in a conflict their followers are fighting on their behalf, and both of them have plans for the mortals who can still write about them.

The duology continues in Ruthless Vows, and the first book ends on the kind of break that makes the second necessary. Ross published both halves within a year of each other, which means the story of Iris and Roman is told in two volumes designed to be read together, and this is a duology rather than an open-ended series.