Breakaway Books

Authored by Rebecca Ross; Published September 2025; Fantasy

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

I have a very particular quirk: I need to read books in narrative chronological order, regardless of the order of publication. In this case, it meant reading Wild Reverence, a prequel, before the previously-published books that occur in the same world. I’m not sure it was the best choice for context, but it did absolutely nothing to diminish from Wild Reverence‘s story, which feels very much like Greek myth.

In Wild Reverence, the goddess Matilda is born stuck between two worlds, the spawn of an affair between a skyward god and an underling goddess. She is granted only a small amount of power as a herald for the gods and thus escapes the notice of most other divines. However, when the goddess of dreams shows Matilda that she has begun to appear in the mortal Vincent’s nightmares to save him, she is set on a path that sets her up for conflict with the most powerful gods in both realms. Irrevocably tied together, Matilda devotes herself to helping Vincent’s kingdom even as she comes into her own power—much greater than it once appeared.

I churned through this novel slowly, because it has the air of Greek tragedy about it, and frankly, I don’t love racing toward a sad ending. From the beginning, there is an air of doomed mismatch that hangs around the romance between Matilda and Vincent, and I hate to see a happy couple parted. (Compounding my disinterest in the romance, Vincent is brave and honorable, but I can’t say there’s much that is particularly unique about him.) The loom of destiny, which is constantly being fought over by the goddesses of Death and Fate, features prominently in their love story, and it carries with it a sense of inevitable separation. Nevertheless, I was drawn in by the richly woven world, and in particular, the twist on the Greek Mount Olympus that is set out in this novel, with fascinating gods divided into skyward and underling domains. We read of the god of war, but also the god of iron and rivers; Matilda is declared to be a herald, but the power of bearing messages has a much deeper significance than one might think. The brutality of these divine courts is impossible to overlook, with gods and goddesses constantly killing each other, even those bound to them by familial ties, to attain the magic that they desire. 

I loved watching Matilda evolve and test the boundaries of her power, but I was also impressed by the depth that the author gives to mere background characters like Adria. Perhaps Adria is a mainstay of other novels in the series, and that is why she has such a rich backstory; in this novel, she merely serves as a kind presence as a foil that clearly portrays lack of humanity of the gods. The villainous gods do come off a little bit flat, but it makes sense for immortal divine beings to embody that kind of flat cruelty. The whole point of gods, in the Greek sense, is that they lack the compassion, the empathy, and the evanescence of human beings. 

Wild Reverence will be particularly appealing to those fans of Greek mythology, but any fan of a new and intricately woven world will enjoy this novel.