Divine Rivals in Order (Letters of Enchantment)

The series title is Letters of Enchantment, which is why searching for it can be confusing: the books are almost always shelved and discussed under the name of the first one.

The reading order

1. Divine Rivals (2023) — Iris Winnow and Roman Kitt compete for the same promotion while unknowingly writing to each other through an enchanted typewriter. The correspondence device is the whole charm, and the war half of the book arrives harder than the cover suggests.
2. Ruthless Vows (2023) — Published eight months later and concluding the story. Picks up on the front line with the pair separated, and resolves everything.
3. Wild Reverence (2025) — A prequel, listed as book zero, set roughly a decade before Divine Rivals and following the goddess Matilda and a mortal named Vincent. Marketed as readable alone, but it works better as background after the duology.

Publication order — the two novels, then the prequel — is the safer recommendation. Reading the prequel first supplies context the duology deliberately withholds.

Why so many lists get this wrong

Two reasons. The duology was published inside a single year, so a great many reading-order posts were written between the two books and describe a series with "more to come". And Wild Reverence arrived two years later under the series name rather than the famous name, so it is missing from a large proportion of the lists that do exist.

The short version: two novels tell the complete story; a third book exists and is a prequel, not a sequel.

There is a fourth reason lists diverge, which is the series name itself. Booksellers file these under Letters of Enchantment; readers search for Divine Rivals; some catalogues use both. If a shop tells you a Letters of Enchantment book is missing from your order, it is not a different series.

What the series is actually like

It is the gentlest entry on this shelf. The romance is epistolary and slow, the violence is real but not gratuitous, and the tone owes as much to First World War fiction as to fantasy. Readers arriving from darker romantasy sometimes describe it as a palate cleanser; readers arriving from historical fiction find it the easiest fantasy to get into.

The trade-off is scale. There is no elaborate magic system and no political map to memorise. The gods are enormous and mostly offstage, and the actual subject is two young journalists trying to tell the truth about a war while falling in love by post.

If you liked Divine Rivals

Caraval for the same fairy-tale register, Serpent & Dove if you want the enemies part sharpened, and ACOTAR for the full-scale version. For rivals-to-lovers in a corset, the historical shelves have been running that plot for two centuries.