Centuries ago, 100 Underling and Skyward gods warred until only five remained. With the gods’ numbers diminished, the humans could band together and place the five gods in a magically induced slumber before burying them under different sections of Cambria. Seven months ago, the Underling god Dacre and the Skyward god Enva awakened. Seeking revenge on his greatest enemy, Dacre declared war on Enva in the west.
Eighteen-year-old Iris Winnow is a high school dropout who works as a journalist at the Oath Gazette to pay the bills for the apartment that she shares with her alcoholic mother. In the months since Iris’s older brother, Forest, enlisted to fight in the war on behalf of Enva, she has barely kept afloat. Her only ambition is to defeat her work rival, Roman, by securing a higher-paying position as a columnist. Despite the reality that Iris cannot report on essential facts about the war due to unethical media censorship by Oath’s chancellor, she holds this goal.
Nineteen-year-old Roman C. Kitt lives a life of his father’s choosing, for he has given up his dreams of obtaining a literature degree to become a journalist and submit to an engagement with Elinor Little, the daughter of a wealthy chemist.
In the months since her brother, Forest, left to join Enva’s war effort, Iris has written letters to Forest using her deceased nan’s Alouette typewriter. After signing off, she slips the letters underneath her wardrobe door, where they mysteriously disappear. Forest himself never writes back, but one day, a mysterious correspondent answers, eventually introducing himself as Carver.
When the untimely death of Iris’s mother, Aster, depletes her devotion to the Gazette and causes her to lose the columnist position to Roman, Iris joins the Inkridden Tribune as a war correspondent. She is determined to locate her brother and is pretty confident that he is either dead or missing from the war front. Once she leaves Oath, Iris is surprised to discover that it is not her wardrobe that is enchanted to deliver her letters to Carver but her typewriter. They learn their typewriters are from a set of three that were transported decades ago to connect three childhood friends (Iris’s and Roman’s respective grandmothers and a sickly girl with tuberculosis named Alouette) across any distance.
This technically falls under a young-adult novel, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I felt pretty invested in Winnow’s life and goal from the story’s start. While I’m not always the biggest romance fan (in novels), I didn’t find it overkill as it’s not the main plot line point. I ultimately found it clever and rooted for the primary and supporting characters.
Rating: 3.5
