What do you want to be true about your next book?

the war and the relationship geared to each other rather than running in parallel

both engines load-bearing, with the politics pressing directly on the couple

a fantasy plot that could not run without this relationship

The book's portrait of trauma (the nightmares, the vanishing appetite, the way everyone's tenderness becomes another wall) is written with a seriousness that romantasy had not, until then, been given credit for attempting.

The gateway most readers take, the court politics arriving after the vows of feeling.

New romantasy readers wanting the current wave's Norse flank, shield-maiden loyalists, and anyone who ever hid a gift to stay safe.

the prophecy operating as an obligation the leads must earn or refuse

Now and then the desk meets a book that a whole subgenre's marketing has slightly mis-sold, and Divine Rivals is our favourite example: shelved with romantasy's dragons and death tournaments, it is in truth a quiet, aching wartime novel about letters — closer in spirit to the great correspondence romances than to anything with a blood oath in it.

The current standard-bearer, the bond and the war college sharing one nervous system.

The reveal-driven wing of the form, identity itself the withheld intimacy.

Kerri Maniscalco's romantasy begins not with a meet-cute but with a murder: Emilia di Carlo, a young witch hiding in plain sight in eighteenth-century Sicily, finds her twin sister Vittoria dead in a way the desk will not describe and the book does not soften.

a magic system that produces the obstacle rather than decorating it

It became one of the defining self-published romantasy breakouts of its season, and the desk confirms the throttle is the product and the product works.

Where book one was a tournament, book two is a war of position — rebel houses, a kingdom fraying, Nyaxia's attention drifting expensive — and Broadbent uses the politics to do what politics is for in romantasy: forcing intimacy between people with every reason to stay armoured.

Honest notices: this is seasonal comfort food and knows it — readers wanting their witchcraft systematised or their stakes existential should visit the romantasy shelf instead.

And the ending executes a turn the desk rates among the strongest in recent romantasy — sized to wound, built from everything planted — about which we will say only that the sequel belongs within reach.