Three people stand at a gate in the wilds of a country that executes anyone born with magic. Above them, perched on a thirty-foot wall, sit winged stone creatures with hooded brows and full sets of teeth, shifting to lower ledges as the visitors talk. They have not been fed for some time. Each of the three gets one question, and a lie means they come down off the wall. The first two questions are survivable. The third asks whether everyone present is human, and one of the party has been bitten. The Divines by Rachel Greenlaw closes the Killmarth Trials duology, and the scene a book group will circle back to is the one where he answers honestly anyway.
What The Divines by Rachel Greenlaw Is Really About
On the surface it is a war story. Vampires cross from a mirror world in waves to feed on people with magic, a secret conflict the public is never told about, and a college on a tidal island is quietly turning its students into soldiers because the professional army is busy fighting a second war on another border.
Underneath, it is a book about bereavement and what it does to method. One character begins the novel immobile in an armchair facing the sea, and someone else has to run her a bath and lay her clothes out on the bed. She moves from that into something colder: she practises in secret until she can pass for one of the enemy, and then she walks away through a door into their world to settle a score. Her journey out of that is the most carefully handled thing in the novel, and it ends not with vengeance but with a decision to imitate the dead man’s silliness instead of his absence.
The Divines by Rachel Greenlaw is also, quietly, about who gets to write a holy book. In a castle hidden inside the hostile territory, a community of refugees keeps the gods’ stories as oral history. They are not hostile to the gods. They simply note that the official scripture was dictated by the gods themselves, which makes it a record kept by the winning side of an argument.
Rachel Greenlaw’s Best Character Is Not the Love Interest
The best character in The Divines by Rachel Greenlaw is a spymaster known as the Collector, and he raised the narrator from the age of six by fastening a blood-bound bracelet on her wrist, locking her in a vault when she defied him, and setting himself up as the wall she could throw herself against until something in her broke loose.
For most of two books he is simply the villain of her childhood. Then the information arrives in pieces: the night he hid a twelve-year-old in a lodge in the deep woods and sat outside the door until the danger passed, never mentioning it again. A sister and parents killed in front of him in his own family home, in an attack his own blood attracted. A dead friend whose daughter he inherited and could not love in any manner she would recognise. Every brutal thing he did to her turns out to be the only tool he had.
The novel calls his love a shaping axe. A group is going to spend a long time on whether that is an excuse, a diagnosis or both, and on the fact that the warmest relationship in a romantasy belongs to a man who never once says anything kind.
Where Rachel Greenlaw Loses the Thread
Three reservations about The Divines by Rachel Greenlaw, and the first will annoy half your table.
The captive prince is comic relief and a punching bag. He has been chained in a palace cellar for eight years, he is sulky and rude about it, and the novel invites you to find that funny. Then the narrator drives a blade through his hand and twists it to make him talk. The book names this as monstrous, lets her feel sick about it for a paragraph, and moves on inside a page. That is a lot of moral weight to pick up and put straight back down.
The secondary deaths land softly. One character is killed early, in a way designed to shock, and is then explicitly described as an absence nobody can quite mourn. That is a sharp observation about war, and it is also a convenient excuse for not writing the grief.
The real villain leaves before the fight. The cleverest antagonist in the book, a trickster whose whole method is survival, reads the room and exits off the page, which leaves the climax to a brawl the narrator largely watches from the grass.
For the Group
Open The Divines by Rachel Greenlaw on the guardian, because everybody will have a verdict and they will not agree. Was he a frightened man doing the only thing he knew, or a man who chose control and told himself it was protection? The novel gives you the evidence for both and refuses to rule.
Then the question of method. The heroine kidnaps a chained man, withholds his medicine to make him cooperate, and tortures him. She says outright that she would sacrifice him without hesitation to save the person she loves, and that perhaps everyone has a monster in them. Ask the room whether the book agrees with her. Ask whether it should.
Then the politics, which are sharper than the genre usually bothers with. One of the three territories is a theocracy that hunts people born with magic, and the refugees in the hidden castle describe religious persecution in the terms it actually takes: a rumour in a village, neighbours turning on neighbours, a trial, and a mother who gutted five men afterwards and has lived alone in the woods ever since. Ask what the book is saying about fear as a governing tool, and whether the heroine’s own territory, which prizes its wielders as assets, is really the opposite of that or just a politer version.
Content notes for The Divines by Rachel Greenlaw, and this is the heaviest book of the four we have covered this week. The sex is explicit, frequent and includes biting and blood. Civilians are the main casualties: a school is attacked, a wedding party is killed, a ballroom of guests is fed on. There are torn throats, snapped necks, a headless body and a man dying on flagstones. Torture happens on the page, narrated by the person inflicting it. One man extracts a promise from another: end me before the change finishes. Grief is everywhere, including catatonia. Someone is wounded by a thrown blade and the treatment is shown. A state executes people for an inherited trait, and a parent describes losing a child to it. A small girl was kept under a blood binding and shut in a vault.
More for the group: The Ordeals by Rachel Greenlaw is the first half and is not optional, as the opening chapters assume all of it. The Woodsmoke Women’s Book of Spells by Rachel Greenlaw is her warmer register if your room wants a rest afterwards. An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole suits a table drawn to inherited magic and the obligations attached. Night Witch by Jaymin Eve works if the school setting is the appeal, and The Book of Autumn by Molly O’Sullivan is the pick for a group that likes its magic bound up with old stories. The author also writes young adult fiction, beginning with Compass and Blade.
After the Last Page
The last act hands the narrator an offer, and her answer is the most interesting decision in either book. She thinks about the trickster goddess, who clawed out of nothing and never stopped wanting more, recognises herself in her, and acts on the recognition. A protagonist turning down the upgrade because she has correctly assessed her own appetite is rare enough to be worth the price of entry.
The Divines by Rachel Greenlaw spends too long in the bedroom, keeps announcing a deadline it never quite makes you feel, and lets its cleverest villain walk. It is still a proper ending, and it leaves a group with a genuinely hard question: whether a person raised by someone who loved them badly is obliged to forgive, and what it costs to decide either way.