Thank you to NetGalley and Del Rey Publishing for the digital review copy and the opportunity to be an early reader. This hits shelves today, October 28th.

Eve Shaw appraises paintings for an auction house. In 2015, on her 27th birthday, she receives an elderly visitor who thanks her as if they’ve met before, gifts her a small glass octopus, and tells her to please come back to the hotel. What hotel is he talking about? And why does this octopus look so eerily like the one tattooed on her thigh?

When Joan Goodwin was a child, she looked up at the night sky and fell in love with the stars. Now grown, she has applied to the NASA space shuttle program as an astronomer and is surprised and amazed to be accepted. She becomes unlikely friends with everyone in her class, including Vanessa Ford, a pilot and engineer. The novel follows Joan’s career, family, and life from 1980-1984 when events threaten the life of the one she loves.

I said in my review of Divine Rivals that I had hopes for this installment in the duology to make up for some of my unmet expectations. That was certainly the case here. My main disappointment came from my desire for more worldbuilding and fantasy elements in the first one, and it wasn’t even a large concern because the book still got over 4 stars from me. This one gave me everything I wanted and more.

This was twisty and genre-bending and I had so much fun with it.

We open with a woman awakening in a bus. She’s disoriented. She doesn’t know who she is, where she is, or when she is.

I’m so late to the game with the hype surrounding this duology. I kept intending to read it, borrowed it from Kindle Unlimited multiple times and somehow kicked it down the road over and over again. Then I got an email offering for me to read Wild Reverence (releasing in September 2025) as an early reader. I said yes, knowing that I really enjoyed Rebecca Ross’s writing in her Elements of Cadence duology. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the new book is set in the world of Divine Rivals. So here we are, finally picking up a book I always intended to read eventually.

While historical fiction isn’t usually my top choice of genre, I was intrigued by this one’s description and setting.