A princess stands at a state ball with her face arranged into nothing. A man on the far side of the room has just been hurt, badly, and she felt every part of it in her own body, because the two of them are tied together in a way that would end both their lives if a single person in that hall worked it out. So she does not look at him. She keeps her chin level, accepts a compliment about the music, and waits. The Wretched Divine by Adalyn Grace is a five-hundred-page romantasy about angels and demons and a kingdom coming apart, and its most useful scenes are all versions of this one: somebody holding a face still over a secret that would cost another person everything.
A Kingdom Where Everybody Is Hiding Somebody
The setup is tidy. Angels serve in five orders under a commander, carry a silver light that kills demons, and outrank each other by wing count. Demons come down from the seven original sins and inherit a talent from whichever one they descend from. Either kind can bond to a human, and a bond means shared pain, shared pleasure and a shared death.
Grace then spends the book putting almost everyone on the wrong side of that arrangement. A knight lied on an official report about a demon she did not kill and has built a career on the lie. A father conceals what is happening to his body; his daughter helps him, with a knife. A queen is protecting her guardian. An heir is protecting a demon. A wine merchant is protecting a five-hundred-year-old grudge. The commander who polices all of it turns out to be concealing the largest thing in the novel.
The Wretched Divine by Adalyn Grace Ranks Its Liars
This is what makes the book worth a group’s evening. It is not neutral about these concealments. It sorts them.
The knight’s lie is treated as a mercy that got filed incorrectly. The father’s is treated as terror. The heir’s is treated as love with a body count attached, because she does not only hide her demon, she acts on his behalf, and one of the things she does with a cup of wine kills somebody she did not aim at. The merchant’s is treated as a con. And the commander’s is treated as the origin of every other lie in the kingdom, since the whole apparatus of divine law turns out to have been built by a frightened man to bury what he did one night to a woman who was asleep.
By the end there is a workable hierarchy on the table: fear, then love, then ambition, then doctrine. A group can argue about that order for an hour, and The Wretched Divine by Adalyn Grace has the confidence not to settle it.
The Problem at the Centre of The Wretched Divine by Adalyn Grace
One thing needs saying flatly, before anyone puts this on a list. The central romance repeatedly stages intimacy in conditions where the heroine cannot straightforwardly refuse, and it does so more than once.
The bond relays a night between the demon and somebody else directly into her body; nobody asked whether she wanted to be present for it. An intoxicant is drunk on his suggestion, and the narration afterwards has her turning over whether the wanting was hers to begin with. In another scene the small winged creatures hovering nearby are ones whose entire established power is suggestion, and they are encouraging her. The novel is not oblivious. Much later it notes, in its own voice, that on this occasion there was nothing around to blame. Underneath all of it he is lying to her about who he is and what his wine does, and the reader knows and she does not.
Some groups will read that as a deliberate study of coercion inside a romance plot. Others will find it unusable. Both readings are available from the text, and it is better to have the disagreement at the start of the meeting than at the end.
What The Wretched Divine by Adalyn Grace Gets Wrong
The cast is larger than the page count can pay for. Five orders, two kingdoms, seven sins, two species of one minor creature, a court, a knight company and an archive.
The middle third is errands. Find the ingredient, travel, obtain it, quarrel, travel again.
The heir gets summary instead of scenes. She is the most morally interesting person here and she is handled at a distance.
One late identity reveal is visible a long way off, because a character is kept offstage in a manner only explicable if he is coming back.
The last page is a cliff and the epilogue is a trailer, so nobody should start this expecting a finish.
Groups who want the same register done differently should try Empire by Sabaa Tahir, which handles a cursed inheritance with far less clutter, or The Lion and the Deathless Dark by Carissa Broadbent for deathlessness written as an injury rather than a perk. Enchantra by Kaylie Smith suits anyone who came to The Wretched Divine by Adalyn Grace for bargains and paid for them, and Angel Down by Daniel Kraus is the chaser for readers who would rather angels were frightening than ranked. The ultimate guide to book tropes is the homework on which patterns Grace is using straight and which she is taking apart.
For the Group
Start with the ending, because it undoes the book’s own moral position. To save a hall full of people, the heroine picks up a stranger’s instrument and uses borrowed magic to make several dozen of her neighbours do something to their bodies that they have not agreed to. She says their names while she does it. She hates it. It works. She has spent five hundred pages as the person who objects to exactly this. Is that a betrayal of her character or the only honest place for her to arrive?
Then the commander’s confession. He had a private feeling, converted it into a rule, and let the rule become a religion that has been shaming people for five centuries. Is he a villain, or an institution with a face on it? Groups with any experience of the second will not find him hard to recognise.
Then the informer. Centuries ago an angel told the truth about his closest friend, for reasons he described to himself as duty and which were not. Everything that happens in The Wretched Divine by Adalyn Grace is downstream of that one accurate report. What does the book think honesty is worth?
And one practical note. There is torture here, on-page mutilation of two kinds, a killing of a monarch, a mass transformation nobody agreed to, a pleasure house, and explicit sex. No warning page is supplied. The consent material above is the item to settle first.
After the Last Page
The sound magic is the best invention in the book, and it is the reason the climax works. A demon who manipulates sound is a demon who can reach you anywhere, because there is nowhere a person can stand that sound does not arrive. Grace then hands that power to a woman whose mother taught her the strings and told her a song outlasts a blade, which is either the loveliest thing in the novel or the cruellest, depending on what you think she does with it. The Orpheus comparison sits there unmentioned and does not need drawing: music that can move anything is music that can move somebody against their will.
What lasts is not the war. It is a broken flute nobody can play any more. A princess with a level chin. A soldier discovering that the worst act of his very long life was the one he committed by following instructions. The Wretched Divine by Adalyn Grace is longer than its plot, uneven in the middle, and genuinely unresolved on the question it is best at, which is whether knowing the truth and saying nothing makes you part of what happens next.