The Book About a Magic Typewriter Wrecked Me

Two rival reporters, one magic typewriter, and a god having a very bad time

Here’s the setup, and it’s a good one. Iris Winnow and Roman Kitt work at the same newspaper and hate each other with the specific, competitive hatred of two people who are both secretly the best writer in the room. Iris is broke and taking care of a mother who drinks to cope with a son gone to war. Roman is rich, aloof, and mourning something he won’t talk about. They’re both gunning for the same columnist job. Fine, normal enemies-to-lovers scaffolding, you’ve read it before.

Then Iris starts writing letters to her missing brother and slipping them under the wardrobe door of her old apartment, because grief makes people do strange, tender, illogical things. Except the letters don’t just sit there. Something writes back. And because this is a book that trusts its own premise, it isn’t long before we (and eventually Iris) realize she isn’t writing to her brother at all. She’s writing to Roman, in the room next door, through some kind of magic neither of them understands yet. They become pen pals without knowing they’re already rivals in real life. That’s the hook and it’s genuinely clever, the kind of premise you wish you’d thought of yourself.

Layered under all of this is a war between two gods, Enva and Dacre, who are using mortals as their battlefield, and journalism itself as a kind of frontline, since Iris and Roman’s newspaper is one of the few outlets willing to report the truth about what’s coming. I like that detail a lot. A book about writers whose actual job matters, where words are treated as a real form of power and not just flavor text.

The letters are the whole book. Everything else is scaffolding.

Look, I need to be honest about something: I would have read three hundred more pages of just the letters. That’s where Ross’s writing is at its best, warm, funny, aching, with Iris and Roman being cagey and vulnerable in ways they’d never allow themselves face to face. There’s a stretch in the middle where Roman starts signing off with more warmth than he means to, and Iris starts looking forward to the wardrobe door in a way she can’t admit to herself, and it made me put the book down and just sit there for a second. I read that section on my lunch break at a table by myself and had to pretend I had something in my eye. That’s the kind of scene this book does better than almost anything else in the genre right now.

The problem is everything happening around the letters is thinner. The war with Dacre is mostly implied, mostly distant, mostly told to us in dread-toned asides rather than shown. Characters mention atrocities that are supposed to be horrifying and I nodded along without actually feeling the horror, because we’re kept so far from the front that it reads more like weather than war. Forest, Iris’s brother, exists mostly as an absence and a plot device. And once Iris and Roman figure out who’s really been writing to whom, which happens sooner than you’d think, the momentum dips hard. The back third turns into a lot of walking toward a city, waiting for a god to show up, and reacting to things instead of driving them.

I also want to push back gently on the discourse that this is basically YA in adult packaging. It reads exactly like Ross’s earlier YA work in voice and pacing, quick chapters, clean prose, low body count of actual complexity, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but calling it adult fantasy sets up expectations this book was never going to meet. Judge it as what it is and it holds up a lot better.

Tangent, but the newspaper setting is criminally underused. A world where a free press is actively fighting a god with facts is such a good idea and I wanted way more time in that newsroom, more scenes of Iris fighting for a byline, more texture on what journalism looks like when the truth might get you killed. Instead we get a few scenes of her editor being gruffly supportive and then the book moves on. That’s a missed swing, not a fatal one, but a real one.

Where the book absolutely delivers: the ending. No spoilers, but the choice Roman makes in the last stretch recontextualizes every letter that came before it, and I actually gasped, alone, in my kitchen, holding a mug of tea that went cold because I forgot about it. Ross knows how to land an emotional gut punch even when the plot around it is loose. That’s a real skill and it’s why I keep recommending this book despite my complaints about it.

This is a book that believes a love letter can be an act of war, and mostly it’s right.

About Rebecca Ross

Rebecca Ross came up through YA fantasy (A Song of Wraiths and Ruin, Elements of Cadence) before Divine Rivals turned her into one of the faces of the current romantasy wave, seemingly overnight even though she’d been building toward this for years. She writes with a soft, lyrical hand and a real fondness for longing over lust, which is probably why her books do so well with readers who want feelings first and spice somewhere down the list, if at all. She’s Scottish, writes fast, and has been open about loving folklore and letters as a device, which tracks given how much of her recent work leans on both.

If this wrecked you, read these next

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake, for more morally messy magic-users who talk around their feelings instead of through them.

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, if you want the fantasy-romance scaffolding turned up louder and spicier.

The Guinevere Deception by Kiersten White, for another writer who’s good at quiet emotional devastation inside a bigger mythic frame.

Ross’s own Ruthless Vows, the sequel, obviously, though go in knowing it answers some questions better than others.

You can grab a copy here: Divine Rivals on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Iris and Roman fall for each other as strangers before they fall for each other as rivals. Does the book earn that, or does it lean on the device too hard?
2. The gods in this book use mortals as pawns and barely appear on the page themselves. Does keeping them distant make the stakes feel bigger or smaller to you?
3. Iris’s mother’s drinking is treated with real tenderness. Did that thread feel resolved to you, or dropped once the plot needed to move?
4. Would this story have worked as well without the war-god backdrop, just as a straight epistolary romance? What does the fantasy add, specifically?
5. The ending changes how you read every letter before it. Did you see it coming, and did that change how satisfying it felt?