Divine Rivals

MINOR SPOILERS

Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross has been on my radar for a while, since all the BookTubers I follow seem very keen on it. I've been branching out into more romance-focused reading so I decided to give it a try.

The audiobook recording was excellent - there were two narrators, one for each of the viewpoint characters and both were really good.

And I really enjoyed a lot of aspects of the book. We follow Iris in her journalistic career, in a fantasy world based quite closely on 1910s Europe, only with active gods and goddesses and magical energy that enchants certain objects and locations.

The worldbuilding was good, I liked the portrayal of Iris' various struggles (primarily with work and family), and the correspondence she strikes up with an unknown recipient of letters typed on her magic typewriter was a great setup for a romance.

However, the way in which that romance progressed was a massive issue for me. It involved a huge betrayal of trust and manipulation of circumstances, a horrendous imbalance of power, and what I consider to be quite unforgiveable actions by one of the parties. I kept listening to find out how these obstacles were going to be overcome - and it was by way of a surprise kiss at a moment when the recipient had clearly expressed anger and distress and a desire to get away. But she accepted it, reciprocated it and then blamed herself for the previous bad behaviour of the other party. And then everything continued with them being in a relationship, without any of the previous issues being addressed, explained or apologised for...

And then I wanted to set the book on fire.

I was still interested in what was happening in the wider story with the war and the gods and everything - but I just couldn't get past my revulsion at the two protagonists being together.

So I won't be reading the sequel.

Ink and Bone

Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine was another charity shop find - unusually, the first in a YA fantasy series I'd never heard of about a world where the Great Library of Alexandria survived and somehow has become a totalitarian regime, strictly controlling access to the written word across the world...

I almost didn't make it past the opening 20 pages because there were so many things about the prologue that were so nonsensical, they even seemed that way to me (and I'm often oblivious to such things). But it got quite a bit better as it went along - though there were still many, many holes and issues with the worldbuilding and the plot throughout.

On one level, it's about a young man going to a magic school, finding friends along the way and having to battle evil forces. So far, so Harry Potter... But it's much more adult than that in a lot of ways, and it has some interesting layers about knowledge and power.

I liked a lot of the characters (though some of the peripheral ones didn't get enough page time to really come to life) and the emotion at the heart of the story was very honest and affecting in places.

I'm not sure I'm invested enough to seek out and read another four volumes, but this had enough to it to keep me reading to the end and almost to forgive how little a lot of it made sense...