Spoiler warning: This review discusses major plot points, character deaths and the ending.
I went into Ruthless Vows almost immediately after Divine Rivals, so by this point I had accepted that yes, this was a world where ancient gods were at war and everybody else had been unfortunate enough to get caught in the middle of it.
And strangely, once I stopped resisting that part of the story, I enjoyed it much more.
The gods themselves still weren’t really what I was there for. I was there for Iris and Roman.
Especially after the way Divine Rivals ended.
They had finally found each other, fallen in love and even married — only for the war to separate them almost immediately. So Ruthless Vows begins with exactly the sort of situation designed to make me miserable: Iris doesn’t know what has happened to Roman, Roman is alive but no longer quite himself, and the two of them have to somehow find their way back to each other.
Naturally, I was invested.
What I liked about this book was that Rebecca Ross didn’t save every bit of happiness for the last five pages.
Iris and Roman had already chosen each other. They were already married. Their relationship wasn’t being dangled in front of me as some reward I might get if I survived another four hundred pages.
Instead, the question became whether they would actually get the chance to have the life they had chosen.
That worked much better for me.
And when they finally found their way back to each other, it had that bittersweet feeling I tend to like in stories about war. You want the people you care about to survive. You want them to get home. You want the happy ending.
But if everyone walks away perfectly fine, then what was the point of putting them through a war in the first place?
Rebecca Ross didn’t do that.
Iris had already lost her mother in the first book. In this one, she loses Forest.
And Sarah.
That hurt.
Especially because Sarah and Forest had found something with each other before they died. There was something particularly cruel about that — two people finding a little bit of happiness in the middle of all this destruction, only for the war to take them anyway.
But I also think the story needed losses like that.
I love happy endings. I really do.
I am not asking authors to destroy everybody I care about just to prove that their story is serious.
But I also don’t want a war story where every important character miraculously survives because the author doesn’t want to upset anyone.
Then it stops feeling like war.
Someone doesn’t come home.
Someone who was loved is missing from the ending.
Someone else has to keep living with that.
That sadness sitting beside Iris and Roman’s happiness is probably one of the reasons the ending worked so well for me.
They get each other back.
They survive.
They have a future.
But it costs them something.
By the end, I had also become much more comfortable with the universe itself. The mixture of old-fashioned technology, newspapers, typewriters and magic that I liked in Divine Rivals was still there, and now that I had accepted the whole gods-at-war business, I could simply enjoy the story instead of wondering why I wasn’t more interested in the mythology.
Maybe I just needed one entire book to get used to it. 😂
Whatever happened, Ruthless Vows worked for me in a way Divine Rivals didn’t quite manage.
The romance had more weight because Iris and Roman had something real to lose.
The war finally felt personal rather than just mythological.
And the ending gave me what I wanted without making everything conveniently perfect.
Happy.
Sad.
A little unfair.
But hopeful.
That’s probably exactly how a story like this should end.
5/5
