Book Review: ‘Curious Tides’ by Pascale Lacelle

This lunar fantasy debut was one of my most anticipated books of 2023 - dark academia, lunar fantasy and that art deco cover? It was a yes from me, but I ended up being pretty disappointed by it.

An atmospheric dark academia fantasy for fans of The Atlas Six, The Binding, The Hazel Wood and Fourth Wing, set in a world of lunar magic, secret societies and dangerous friendships.

Emory is returning to the prestigious Aldryn College for Lunar Magic for one reason: to uncover the secrets behind the night that left her best friend, Romie, and seven other students dead.

But Emory has plenty of secrets herself, not least that her healing abilities have been corrupted by a strange, impossible magic, granting her power no one should possess.

Turning to the only person she believes she can trust, Emory enlists the help of Romie’s brother Baz – someone already well-versed in the dangers of his own dark Eclipse magic.

But when the supposedly drowned students start washing ashore – alive – only for them each immediately to die horrible, magical deaths, Emory and Baz are no longer the only ones seeking answers.

There's a hidden society at the heart of the school, and they’re attracted to nothing more than they are to power...

This was the second book we discussed in this season of our podcast, ‘The Dark Academicals’, and you can listen to the full episode right here:

This is a long book - the UK hardcover sits at 544 pages and the audio racks up 16 hours and 41 minutes - and not a lot happened for the first 400 pages of it.

I was so excited about discovering the magic system, and with the promise of such a long book I was expecting a lot, but it didn’t quite give me the depth and breadth of it that I had hoped. Lunar magic isn’t something that I’ve come across before and I loved the idea of a person’s type magic being dependent on the moon phase that they were born under and the way that it waxes and wanes along with the changes every month. It’s a really fascinating set-up, but we so rarely actually saw the characters practicing magic in any way, or even learning about it in the school setting, it just was.

I wanted more from it.

When it comes to the characters, I ended up wanting something just different to what was delivered. In our podcast episode we discussed the want for the novel to written from the perspective from side characters who were meatier, more challenging and more unexpected and the way that would change the narrative and push more focus onto the things that we both felt were lacking - the magic system and the wider world-building.

Pascale Lacelle’s writing is beautiful and her ideas are vivid and exciting, but the execution just missed the mark for me this time.

Written by Sophie