Letters of Enchantment!

Divine Rivals: A Novel (Letters of Enchantment #1) by Rebecca Ross   

Series note: (Iris at the Front #1) on Amazon

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Iris Winnow has always wanted to be a writer. When offered a trial job with the newspaper, the Oath Gazette, she seizes it. It turns out she’ll be in competition with an Ivy League type, handsome and rich, Roman Kitt. Iris does delightful things to annoy Roman, like moving his precisely arranged pencils. 

Working from home on her Nan’s old type writer she puts a letter into the wardrobe. The next day she receives an answer. What!? Iris believes she’s writing to her brother. Her corespondent sets the record straight and tells Iris he’s not Forest. They continue to write sharing their deepest secrets and painful memories.

Forest is off fighting the war for the Skyward goddess Enva against a defeated god of the Underling, Dacre.

Later, after some life changing moments, Iris resigns and becomes a war correspondent with a rival newspaper, the Inkridden Tribune. Mostly she interviews wounded soldiers behind the lines but when the opportunity opens to go to the front, she does. It’s akin to World War I in the trenches, without planes rather flying creatures called eithrals who drop bombs and gas, and the Hounds, wolf like creatures who kill at the slightest movement after dark.

Felix, having spurned his family’s requirement to marry the daughter of a chemist professor Elinor Little. Roman joins her at the front. (I can’t help putting his ex-fiancé's father’s position as a research chemist with the the gas containers on the front. After all, Felix’s father and that of his fiancé support Dacre) 

We are left with Felix badly injured, the Dacreans having advanced their lines and overrun the town the correspondents were billeted in, and Forest mysteriously saving Cordelia as the enemy advances. What has happened to Roman in that devastating flight from the enemy.

Highly descriptive, tense writing produces well crafted scenes that really came alive. I was in the trenches quaking and terrified, on the fields gasping for breath whilst fleeing poisonous gases. Enveloped in the arms of my found love. An enemies to lovers romance that sighs into being. 

A magical take on a twisted Orpheus and Eurydice theme with Dacre angered about being deceived by Enva when she escapes to the Sky, then returns, plays her harp and leaves Dacre asleep for two hundred years. Dacre has awakened and wants revenge. The God’s twisted anger sends a shiver down my spine. Humans have been dragged into the war. Their suffering is just beginning I suspect.

A St. Martin’s Press ARC via NetGalley.                                              

Many thanks to the author and publisher.