If You Liked Divine Rivals, Here's What to Read Next
Bookdot Team • •
#divine rivals#rebecca ross#readalikes#romantasy#epistolary romance#enemies to lovers#war fantasy
Iris Winnow doesn’t know that the person writing her back is Roman Kitt, the columnist she’s fighting for the same job at the Oath Gazette. She started leaving letters to her older brother Forest under the door of her wardrobe after he left for the war — an old habit, a way to keep talking to someone who might not be able to answer. Through an enchantment neither of them understands, those letters cross into Roman’s own wardrobe instead, and he starts writing back. Neither says who they are. By day they trade barbed one-liners across a shared newsroom desk, competing for the same promotion; by night they tell each other things neither has said out loud to anyone else. Rebecca Ross published Divine Rivals in 2023, opening the Letters of Enchantment duology, and it became one of the defining romantasy hits of the BookTok era — not for spice, since there’s barely any, but for the ache of two people falling for each other twice: once without knowing it, and once in plain sight.
Ross builds that romance on top of a genuinely unsettling backdrop. Enva, goddess of wind and writing, and Dacre, god of destruction, are dragging the mortal world into a war between gods that nobody asked for. Iris’s brother is missing at the front. Her mother has been drowning her grief in drink since Iris’s father died in the last war these same gods started. By the back half of the book, Iris is filing dispatches from the front lines as one of Oath’s only female war correspondents, still writing letters into what she thinks is silence — and the reader knows better.
What You’re Actually Chasing
Before the list, it’s worth naming the specific ingredients Ross is working with, because “romantasy” covers a lot of ground and Divine Rivals is doing something narrower and stranger than most books filed under that tag.
The anonymous correspondence is the engine of the whole book — two people building real intimacy through letters before either knows who’s on the other end, which makes the eventual reveal land as recognition rather than surprise. The enemies-to-lovers rivalry gives the daylight scenes their crackle: Iris and Roman are genuinely competing for the same job, and the banter is sharper for it. The gods-and-war backdrop raises the stakes past the romance itself, turning a newsroom story into something closer to wartime fiction. And running under everything is Ross’s lyrical, melancholic prose, which treats letters, grief, and longing as worth the same careful attention as the plot.
The books below lean hardest into one or more of those ingredients — some chase the letters, some the rivalry, some the war, some the ache.
Attachments by Rainbow Rowell — For Falling for Someone Through Their Words First
Rainbow Rowell’s 2011 debut swaps enchanted typewriters for office email, but the shape of the romance is startlingly close to Iris and Roman’s. Lincoln O’Neill takes a job as an internet security officer at a newspaper called the Courier, tasked with flagging inappropriate employee email — and instead of flagging Beth Fremont’s messages to her best friend, he keeps reading them, falling for a woman he’s never spoken to based entirely on her writing. Beth doesn’t know he exists until she does.
It’s the same premise Ross builds Divine Rivals around — real feeling built on one-sided or anonymous written intimacy — except Rowell sets it in a contemporary newsroom instead of a war-threatened one, and plays the deception for comedy as much as ache.
The Divine Rivals connection: Falling for someone through their private words before either of you says who you are, and a newspaper setting that gives the whole thing a workplace-rivalry undertone.
The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons — For a Wartime Romance That Costs Everything
Paullina Simons’s 2000 novel is the book to reach for if what gutted you about Divine Rivals was the war closing in around the romance rather than the romance itself. Set in Leningrad in 1941, it follows Tatiana Metanova and Alexander Belov as they fall in love just as the German siege begins, forcing an already forbidden relationship — Alexander is secretly engaged to Tatiana’s sister — into a fight for survival that swallows years and continents.
Where Ross keeps her war mostly at the edges of Divine Rivals, Simons puts hers front and center, and the result is the kind of doomed-feeling, epic-scale romance that makes Iris and Roman’s letters feel like a warning shot for something much larger.
The Divine Rivals connection: A love story that has to survive an actual war, letters and separation as the primary obstacle, and the sense that history itself is working against the couple.
A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas — For Gods, an Impending War, and Romance in the Wreckage
Sarah J. Maas’s 2016 sequel is the pick for readers who wanted more of Ross’s gods-shaped stakes — Enva and Dacre gearing up for a war that will use mortals as kindling. In A Court of Mist and Fury, Feyre recovers from her ordeal in the Spring Court while the looming threat of Hybern’s invasion pulls every faction of Prythian toward a war none of them are ready for, and her slow-building relationship with Rhysand develops in the same stolen, uncertain moments Iris and Roman get between newsroom shifts.
It’s a spicier, more sprawling book than Divine Rivals, but the core shape — a romance that has to compete for space with a war between immortal powers — is the same.
The Divine Rivals connection: Ancient, godlike forces dragging mortals into a war, and a romance that has to find room to grow in the margins of that conflict.
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller — For a Devastating, Lyrical Wartime Love Story
Madeline Miller’s 2011 debut retells the Iliad from Patroclus’s point of view, following his bond with Achilles from boyhood exile through the Trojan War that will eventually take both of them. Like Divine Rivals, it’s less interested in war as spectacle than in what war does to two people who love each other — the letters and stolen moments Iris and Roman cling to have an equivalent here in the tent Achilles and Patroclus share on the beach at Troy, a private world carved out of a public catastrophe.
Miller’s prose has the same unhurried, aching quality Ross’s does — sentences built to be sat with rather than rushed past — and the ending, like Divine Rivals’s cliffhanger into Ruthless Vows, is less a twist than an inevitability you spend the whole book bracing for.
The Divine Rivals connection: Lyrical, melancholic prose, a love story shaped entirely by the war surrounding it, and stakes that feel mythic rather than merely dangerous.
The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang — For War Fantasy That Doesn’t Flinch
R.F. Kuang’s 2018 debut follows Rin, a war orphan who tests into an elite military academy and discovers a connection to the Phoenix, a god whose power comes at a devastating cost. Where Divine Rivals keeps its war mostly offstage until its final stretch, The Poppy War walks directly into it, drawing on the history of the Second Sino-Japanese War to write a fantasy that refuses to soften what war actually does to the people fighting it.
It’s a much darker, more morally complicated book than Ross’s — Rin is no Iris Winnow — but readers who wanted Divine Rivals to sit longer in its gods-and-war machinery, rather than resolve mostly through letters and longing, will find that here.
The Divine Rivals connection: A war orchestrated by god-like forces that mortals are conscripted into, and a story willing to let that war actually cost something.
Uprooted by Naomi Novik — For Slow-Burn Romance Under an Existential Threat
Naomi Novik’s 2015 fairy-tale novel follows Agnieszka, a village girl taken by the reclusive wizard known as the Dragon to serve him for ten years, in a valley menaced by a corrupting, sentient forest called the Wood. The romance between Agnieszka and the Dragon builds slowly and reluctantly, the two of them forced into proximity by a threat neither can outrun — the same pressure-cooker dynamic that pushes Iris and Roman together even as they keep insisting they’re rivals, not allies.
Novik’s prose leans into folklore and atmosphere the way Ross’s leans into melancholy and longing, and both books trust a slow burn to do more work than a fast one ever could.
The Divine Rivals connection: A romance that grows out of shared danger rather than instant attraction, and a folkloric, atmospheric prose style built for lingering.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows — For Letters as the Whole Architecture of the Story
This 2008 epistolary novel is the book for readers who specifically loved the mechanics of Divine Rivals — letters as the thing carrying the plot, not just decorating it. Juliet Ashton, a journalist in post-WWII London, begins corresponding with the members of a literary society on the island of Guernsey, uncovering their wartime stories letter by letter and, eventually, falling for the island and one of its residents along the way.
It’s a gentler, more optimistic book than Divine Rivals — no gods, no active war by the time the letters start — but the structural pleasure is identical: a relationship built almost entirely out of what people choose to write down, from a journalist protagonist not unlike Iris herself.
The Divine Rivals connection: A story told substantially through letters, a journalist at its center, and a war (WWII, in this case) shaping everything the correspondents have to say to each other.
Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik — For Fairy-Tale Gods, Bargains, and Multiple Points of View
Naomi Novik’s 2018 follow-up to Uprooted trades a single narrator for three — Miryem, a moneylender’s daughter who accidentally turns silver into gold and draws the attention of the cold, dangerous Staryk king; Wanda, a farm girl escaping her father’s house; and Irina, a duke’s daughter married off for reasons of state. Like Divine Rivals, it’s a book about people making dangerous bargains with forces older and stranger than themselves, and about romance that has to be negotiated rather than simply felt.
The multiple perspectives give it a wider, more novelistic scope than Divine Rivals, but the fairy-tale bones and the sense of gods (or god-adjacent kings) reshaping mortal lives around their own ancient grudges will feel familiar.
The Divine Rivals connection: Ancient, powerful figures whose conflicts reshape ordinary lives, and a romance built on wary negotiation rather than instant trust.
The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden — For Atmospheric Folklore and a War Closing In
Katherine Arden’s 2017 debut, set in medieval Russia, follows Vasya, a girl who can see the household spirits her village has stopped honoring, just as a charismatic priest arrives preaching against the old ways — leaving Vasya to fight a threat from the wilderness that no one else believes is real. The romance here is quieter and more ambiguous than Divine Rivals’s, but the folkloric dread, the sense of an old world being pushed toward war with a newer one, and the wintry, melancholic atmosphere all land in the same register as Ross’s Oath.
Readers who loved how Divine Rivals made its gods feel like weather — inevitable, indifferent, closing in regardless of what mortals want — will recognize that same pressure here.
The Divine Rivals connection: Folkloric atmosphere, an old world colliding with a new one, and a sense of encroaching war that the protagonist can feel before anyone else takes it seriously.
Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor — For Dreamlike Prose and a Forbidden Connection
Laini Taylor’s 2017 novel follows Lazlo Strange, a junior librarian obsessed with the lost city of Weep, who finally travels there and falls for Sarai, a blue-skinned godspawn who can only walk through people’s dreams at night, since the citizens of Weep would kill her if they knew she existed in daylight. Like Iris and Roman’s letters, Lazlo and Sarai’s relationship exists in a stolen, secret space — his dreams — that has nothing to do with how the world sees either of them.
Taylor’s prose is even more ornate than Ross’s, but the two books share a commitment to romance as something built in private, imaginative space before it’s ever allowed into the light.
The Divine Rivals connection: A secret, private connection that exists apart from the couple’s public identities, gods and godspawn shaping the plot’s stakes, and lush, dreamlike prose.
Tracking a TBR Built on Letters and War
Books like Divine Rivals reward a particular kind of attention — you’re tracking two relationships at once, the daylight rivalry and the nighttime correspondence, and trying to guess how long the author can keep them from colliding. That’s a satisfying enough puzzle that it’s worth remembering which authors deliver the reveal well (Ross seeds it carefully) versus which ones just spring it.
A reading tracker earns its keep on a list like this one. Logging which epistolary romances actually landed, tagging the ones with real wartime stakes versus the ones that keep the war offstage, and keeping a running list of authors whose slow burns you trust means you’re not standing in a bookstore trying to remember whether you already read the Naomi Novik one. Bookdot lets you organize exactly that kind of reading — tracking books and series, noting which tropes worked for you, and building your next read before Ruthless Vows’s ending has even fully settled.
The specific ache Divine Rivals leaves behind is the letters — the idea that someone could know you better through what you write in the dark than through anything you say in daylight. The ten books above chase that feeling from ten different directions. Start with whichever ingredient hit hardest, and expect, eventually, to want them all.
Tracking every romantasy, wartime epic, and epistolary slow burn on your TBR? Bookdot keeps your reading list organized so your next Divine Rivals-shaped read is always one tap away.
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Frequently Asked Questions
- Is Divine Rivals a spicy book?
- No. Divine Rivals is closed-door — the romance runs on longing, letters, and banter rather than explicit scenes. It reads closer to YA-adjacent adult fantasy than to spicier romantasy series like A Court of Thorns and Roses.
- Do I need to read Ruthless Vows after Divine Rivals?
- Yes. Ruthless Vows is the direct sequel that completes Rebecca Ross's two-book Letters of Enchantment duology, and it picks up immediately where Divine Rivals leaves off, so the story is not resolved until you finish both.
- What other books use letters or objects to connect two people who don't know who they're talking to?
- Attachments by Rainbow Rowell and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows both build their romances on written correspondence between people who start out as strangers, much like Iris and Roman's anonymous letters in Divine Rivals.