Wild Reverence
Wild Reverence
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
Rebecca Ross on Wild Reverence
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A door left cracked, a reader question that wouldn’t stopEvery stop on the Ruthless Vows tour, fans asked the same thing: would she write about the gods? She had already been thinking about exactly that, because she’d made a deliberate choice not to close every opening in the world she built.
I knew even when I wrapped the duology up with ‘Ruthless Vows,’ I had left a few doors and windows cracked in the world building.
The most persistent of those openings was the enchanted typewriter at the center of Divine Rivals, the device that lets Iris and Roman correspond across a war front without knowing who is on the other end. Readers kept asking where that magic came from, and the question eventually pointed her six centuries back in time.
I remember being like, ‘This is such a fun element to play with in these novels, can I go further back and trace that enchantment to the goddess that inspired it from the very beginning?’ That’s how I found Matilda.
Matilda, the messenger goddess at the center of Wild Reverence, is in this sense the origin story the earlier books assumed but never told.
Setting the book 600 years before Divine Rivals was a choice about what was still possible at that moment in the world’s history. She wanted to write the gods while they were still undefeated, before the divine conflicts of the duology had resolved in the mortals’ favor.
She described wanting to set the book before the gods of the duology had been conquered or laid to rest, so she could ‘dig really deep into what it was like’ when they were still reigning. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
A completed manuscript she had to abandonShe submitted a finished draft, not a partial one. The whole manuscript existed, structured the way she’d written the Letters of Enchantment duology, before she realized it wasn’t working.
I wrote the entire book, the whole first draft, that way, and I just felt like something was missing.
She went back to her editor and asked to start over in first person. The specific problem she needed to solve was one that third-person narration was flattening: Matilda is a goddess and Vincent is mortal, and those two characters would feel years passing in fundamentally different ways. The rewrite that followed wasn’t a structural revision of what already existed.
When I shifted the book and rewrote the whole thing, I even changed where it was. I wasn’t necessarily following the same structure. A very different type of story emerged. Even though the bones from the original were still there, it just felt very different.
Bade, the god of war who becomes one of the book’s most important figures, did not exist in the original draft at all. He came into being only in the rewrite, along with the entire childhood Act One that gives the adult reunion its weight.
Bade arrived organically once she found him, but she knew exactly what she wanted his relationship with young Matilda to feel like. She had a direct reference point from outside books entirely.
‘God of War’ is one of my favorite video games ever: you have Kratos, this big, burly, emotionally-closed off man traveling with sweet, cute little Atreus. I just love it so much. So I think, like with Bade and Matilda, I could kind of envision the two of them, even though they’re not traveling, they have that dynamic.
The divine world she was building kept threatening to swallow the story. Every new god or goddess she could have introduced was a temptation that came with a cost.
I had to rein myself in a little bit, because I could have kept bringing up so many other gods and goddesses into the story and slowing it down tremendously.
When a scene refused to come together at the desk, she found a workaround that became a fixture of her process on this book. She lives on a small farm in Washington State, and she started taking her problems outside.
They’re like little therapy chickens.
She would walk out to the yard, watch her six chickens, and talk through the stuck scenes aloud into her phone. The chickens, she said, were ideal listeners.
What she wants us to sit with
Two ways in, one emotional weightShe engineered the book to work for two completely different readers at the same time. A reader arriving with no knowledge of Divine Rivals or Ruthless Vows should be able to finish Wild Reverence and feel the story is complete. A reader who knows those books will encounter Easter eggs woven throughout, catching references that carry an additional layer of consequence.
I wouldn’t know if I necessarily call it a prequel because it’s really its own thing, but if you have read ‘Divine Rivals’ you’re definitely going to recognize a few characters.
The question she hadn’t had to sit with in any previous book was what time feels like from inside an immortal consciousness. Matilda ages differently than Vincent, and writing both of their first-person perspectives meant she had to inhabit that gap rather than narrate around it from a distance.
She described writing from an immortal’s perspective as ‘really interesting to be able to dig deep into that mindset,’ and talked about the difference between a goddess’s experience of years passing and a mortal’s — how different those two relationships to time would be. [paraphrased from audio]