Divine Rivals

About the Divine Rivals series

Iris Winnow and Roman Kitt are rival columnists at a struggling newspaper in a city where two warring gods, Enva and Dacre, are dragging the mortal world into a devastating conflict. When Iris starts writing letters to her missing brother and slipping them beneath her wardrobe door, the letters vanish -- and answers begin arriving in a hand she doesn't recognize. She has no idea she's corresponding with Roman, the infuriating rival she can't stand at work, through a scrap of enchanted magic neither of them understands.

What follows is a slow-burn, epistolary enemies-to-lovers romance wrapped around a war between gods, as both journalists are eventually sent to the front lines to report on a conflict that starts consuming everything around them. Ross builds a wistful, painterly version of a WWI-era world -- typewriters and newsrooms sitting alongside gods who can bless or curse a battlefield -- and lets the central romance unfold almost entirely through longing letters before the leads ever admit the truth to each other's faces.

It's the book that helped kick off BookTok's romantasy wave: gorgeous, melancholy prose, a genuinely surprising identity reveal, low spice, and an ending that trades a tidy resolution for something more bittersweet. Readers who want fantasy romance without a body count of explicit scenes, who love letters-across-distance premises, or who miss the ache of early Cassandra Clare and Laini Taylor, tend to fall hard for this one.