Divine Rivals

Written words have a significant emotional impact on their recipients in Divine Rivals, and this dynamic ultimately influences the actions and behaviors that the protagonists exhibit throughout the novel, as words inspire both Roman and Iris to take control of their fates and rewrite their own destinies. As the story unfolds, journalism becomes the characters’ primary means of embracing their own agency, for they use the power of their words to inform, inspire, and influence a public who would otherwise remain largely ignorant of the realities of the war. Yet even before they both find their true calling as war correspondents, the characters’ earliest writings still work to inspire, for as early as Chapter 1, Iris mentions reading an article that Roman wrote about a retired baseball player. The narrative emphasizes that baseball was “a sport Iris had never cared about but suddenly found herself ensorcelled by, all due to the poignant and witty tone of Roman’s writing” (11). Iris is nearly hypnotized by Roman’s writing ability in this moment, and the scene foreshadows the power that his words will continue to have over her as their semi-anonymous correspondence develops. The effectiveness of his writing also implies the larger goal of the characters’ writing to use words to inspire others to emotion and to action on important topics: an incredibly useful skill in the struggle to convince readers that Enva, not Dacre, holds the moral high ground in the ongoing war.