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lizzietherebel 's review for:
Divine Rivals
by Rebecca Ross
Just a big WTF to this entire novel. I wanted to like this book a lot, it's been so hyped up, but I should know better by now than to just trust the hype. I had so many problems with this. The first half of the book, I was able to overlook a lot of the issues I had with the writing because I found the story compelling and I was invested in Iris as a character. Somewhere between 1/3-1/2 of the way in, I really began to lose interest. However interesting the initial premise, it couldn't hold up to a full novel. I felt like hardly anything happened throughout the entire book and I found myself so annoyed at the length of it and the fact that I wasted as much time as I did slogging through to avoid DNF-ing it.
The writing itself is really awkward and inconsistent. At times, Ross has nice metaphors and I can understand why many readers are quick to call her "poetic" based on those. But for the most part, it feels like she relied heavily on a thesaurus and on watching British period dramas and trying to recreate what she thought was complex/high-brow dialogue. The result is awkward and jarring and overly-formal in a way that doesn't work or make sense, especially how strangely formal Iris is at times, which seems weird given her poor upbringing in comparison to Kitt's very privileged and wealthy one. The dialogue is so uncomfortable and unrealistic. So many awkward word choices. So many sentences that I just stopped at and had to reread several times just to realize that they are indeed as cringey as they initially read as. I don't understand why the characters have to use the first name of the person they're speaking to so often in the dialogue, especially when it's obvious who they're talking to. It really feels like no one ever read the dialogue aloud to see how it would actually sound spoken because if they had, it all would've been scrapped.
In general, Ross seems to be trying so extremely hard to make her prose lyrical and profound that it just comes off overdone and cheesy. So much of it made me cringe, I really wonder at the editing. At least 100 pages could've been cut from this story and it wouldn't have affected the plot at all.
Every side character was the same person and had no distinctive voice or personality traits to differentiate them from each other. Roman himself has all of the personality of a string bean and while I thought he and Iris started off with some decent chemistry, it quickly fizzled right out and I found that I really did not care whether they got together or what happened to them. Maybe it's because I found their letters so annoying. They're trying to seem so deep and it has the exact opposite effect. I quickly lost any connection I felt to either of them or their love story.
It feels like- as Ross stated in her acknowledgments- Ross was really inspired by the idea of these romantic letters and a girl writing to who she thinks is her brother but actually ends up being her rival. Everything else is just her pulling teeth trying to create a story around that concept. The entire idea of this being a fantasy world is so far-fetched and lazy. There was absolutely no world-building. This is essentially a story set in England during WW2, but the author decided she wanted to make up her own details about the war and about how Iris could've ended up in the thick of the war as a woman, so she threw in the idea of "gods" and a few mythical creatures, and changed the names of the towns. I really found it sloppy and confusing. Why is it set in this mythical world where there are gods when it changes literally nothing about their actual day-to-day lives? I saw that the book was marketed as magical realism, but I think that's also being lazy. Either create a fantasy world or don't, but don't use a couple elements of fantasy where it suits you and then mainly rely on elements of the real world because you can't be bothered to actually create your own universe, especially when the few elements of fantasy that you do use, like the "gods." are supposedly the entire premise of your story. This is not what magical realism is.
The bits where Ross would have the characters reveal some myth or lore about the gods through their letter-writing were annoying, boring, and also a lazy way of imparting information that I suppose was meant to be important; I say "meant to be important" because I can't remember a single thing about these myths because they were that boring and unclear as to what the fucking relevance was. I had no reason to care about these gods or their war other than that Iris decides to go report on it and look out for her brother in the second half of the book. I guess that was supposed to give me enough reason to care, but it didn't.
A few plot points in particular I had issues with [CONTAINS SPOILERS]:
Why Iris thought it was a good idea to take Roman on a long walk up a fucking hill when he had just had his leg blown apart by shrapnel.
Why Roman had to dramatically af rip his own fucking IV out when Iris goes to visit him in the infirmary so that he can kiss her? All of that was so unnecessary and just fucking weird, not romantic.
Everything that goes down when Iris goes with Forest at the end and discovers he's been working with Dacre and that he had stolen the supplies from the B&B and was watching her for days. It all felt way too contrived and bizarre.
Iris and Forest returning to their mum's flat at the end which they for some reason kept possession of/continued to rent even after Iris left and their mum died? They didn't even have enough money for electricity, but they were able to hold onto this unoccupied flat for months, not knowing if anyone would ever return, and nobody touched anything inside.
Basically the second half of the book felt rushed and lazy as fuck, nothing was fully fleshed out, lots of confusing and bizarre turns of events, and now Iris and Roman are married even though between hating each other and proposing, the only chance they actually got to develop their relationship as actual friends was going on a couple runs and her sitting on his lap on their way to the frontlines. The way they jumped into being in love and getting married the same day was super unrealistic to me. Also unrealistic that they got married and then after they get separated Iris is like, I never told him I love him!
The premise of the second book sounds interesting once again, but I know that even if it's the best premise in the world, the writing is going to be so cringe as to not make a sentence of it worth my time.
The writing itself is really awkward and inconsistent. At times, Ross has nice metaphors and I can understand why many readers are quick to call her "poetic" based on those. But for the most part, it feels like she relied heavily on a thesaurus and on watching British period dramas and trying to recreate what she thought was complex/high-brow dialogue. The result is awkward and jarring and overly-formal in a way that doesn't work or make sense, especially how strangely formal Iris is at times, which seems weird given her poor upbringing in comparison to Kitt's very privileged and wealthy one. The dialogue is so uncomfortable and unrealistic. So many awkward word choices. So many sentences that I just stopped at and had to reread several times just to realize that they are indeed as cringey as they initially read as. I don't understand why the characters have to use the first name of the person they're speaking to so often in the dialogue, especially when it's obvious who they're talking to. It really feels like no one ever read the dialogue aloud to see how it would actually sound spoken because if they had, it all would've been scrapped.
In general, Ross seems to be trying so extremely hard to make her prose lyrical and profound that it just comes off overdone and cheesy. So much of it made me cringe, I really wonder at the editing. At least 100 pages could've been cut from this story and it wouldn't have affected the plot at all.
Every side character was the same person and had no distinctive voice or personality traits to differentiate them from each other. Roman himself has all of the personality of a string bean and while I thought he and Iris started off with some decent chemistry, it quickly fizzled right out and I found that I really did not care whether they got together or what happened to them. Maybe it's because I found their letters so annoying. They're trying to seem so deep and it has the exact opposite effect. I quickly lost any connection I felt to either of them or their love story.
It feels like- as Ross stated in her acknowledgments- Ross was really inspired by the idea of these romantic letters and a girl writing to who she thinks is her brother but actually ends up being her rival. Everything else is just her pulling teeth trying to create a story around that concept. The entire idea of this being a fantasy world is so far-fetched and lazy. There was absolutely no world-building. This is essentially a story set in England during WW2, but the author decided she wanted to make up her own details about the war and about how Iris could've ended up in the thick of the war as a woman, so she threw in the idea of "gods" and a few mythical creatures, and changed the names of the towns. I really found it sloppy and confusing. Why is it set in this mythical world where there are gods when it changes literally nothing about their actual day-to-day lives? I saw that the book was marketed as magical realism, but I think that's also being lazy. Either create a fantasy world or don't, but don't use a couple elements of fantasy where it suits you and then mainly rely on elements of the real world because you can't be bothered to actually create your own universe, especially when the few elements of fantasy that you do use, like the "gods." are supposedly the entire premise of your story. This is not what magical realism is.
The bits where Ross would have the characters reveal some myth or lore about the gods through their letter-writing were annoying, boring, and also a lazy way of imparting information that I suppose was meant to be important; I say "meant to be important" because I can't remember a single thing about these myths because they were that boring and unclear as to what the fucking relevance was. I had no reason to care about these gods or their war other than that Iris decides to go report on it and look out for her brother in the second half of the book. I guess that was supposed to give me enough reason to care, but it didn't.
A few plot points in particular I had issues with [CONTAINS SPOILERS]:
Why Iris thought it was a good idea to take Roman on a long walk up a fucking hill when he had just had his leg blown apart by shrapnel.
Why Roman had to dramatically af rip his own fucking IV out when Iris goes to visit him in the infirmary so that he can kiss her? All of that was so unnecessary and just fucking weird, not romantic.
Everything that goes down when Iris goes with Forest at the end and discovers he's been working with Dacre and that he had stolen the supplies from the B&B and was watching her for days. It all felt way too contrived and bizarre.
Iris and Forest returning to their mum's flat at the end which they for some reason kept possession of/continued to rent even after Iris left and their mum died? They didn't even have enough money for electricity, but they were able to hold onto this unoccupied flat for months, not knowing if anyone would ever return, and nobody touched anything inside.
Basically the second half of the book felt rushed and lazy as fuck, nothing was fully fleshed out, lots of confusing and bizarre turns of events, and now Iris and Roman are married even though between hating each other and proposing, the only chance they actually got to develop their relationship as actual friends was going on a couple runs and her sitting on his lap on their way to the frontlines. The way they jumped into being in love and getting married the same day was super unrealistic to me. Also unrealistic that they got married and then after they get separated Iris is like, I never told him I love him!
The premise of the second book sounds interesting once again, but I know that even if it's the best premise in the world, the writing is going to be so cringe as to not make a sentence of it worth my time.