【 CURIOUS TIDES】
book #1 in the Drowned Gods series

Genre: Fantasy
Audience: Young Adult
Author: Pascale Lacelle
Published: October 2023
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 530 (paperback)

Okay, I’ve got to go 3 stars for this one. In short, this was a great story with a really interesting magic system, but was let down by its unnecessary length.

I was tempted to DNF this early on, but was so curious about how the story would develop that I committed to it.

Ultimately, this has dark academia vibes, and is a magic school for those with strong magic. There is little to no time spent in the magic school or it’s classes (a shame), and mostly it revolves around external research & cults that the students get caught up in. Magic is determined by when you were born and the moon phase/tidal position at that time.

There are lots of kinds of magics (like 4 or more within each lunar phase) and the added tension of deep prejudices against eclipse-born students, who are rare and have much more powerful (and unique) magic types.

It was fascinating to see what story was built throughout, but it was just so waffly. This felt very overwritten – it tried too hard to *be* something. The descriptions were tedious and actually quite repetitive between the 2 perspectives (Emory and Baz).

While there were many good aspects to this, and things I enjoyed enough to keep me on until the last page, for me this was hampered by the writing and could easily have been 200 pages shorter.

It’s part of a series, but even though there are (annoyingly) some big questions left unanswered at the end, I’ll have to have a long, hard think about whether I want to continue reading the series.

If you want to read this, my only advice is that if you feel similarly by page 50, it won’t change and DNF’ing won’t leave you with as many unanswered questions as you think.

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Title: Curious Tides
Series: Drowned Gods
Author: Pascale Lacelle
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Emory might be a student at the prestigious Aldryn College for Lunar Magics, but her healing abilities have always been mediocre at best—until a treacherous night in the Dovermere sea caves leaves a group of her classmates dead and her as the only survivor.

Now Emory is plagued by strange, impossible powers that no healer should possess. Powers that would ruin her life if the wrong person were to discover them. To gain control of these new abilities, Emory enlists the help of the school’s most reclusive student, Baz—a boy already well-versed in the deadly nature of darker magic, whose sister happened to be one of the drowned students and Emory’s best friend.

Determined to find the truth behind the drownings and the cult-like secret society she’s convinced her classmates were involved in, Emory is faced with even more questions when the supposedly drowned students start washing ashore —alive—only for them each immediately to die horrible, magical deaths.

And Emory is not the only one seeking answers. When her new magic captures the society’s attention, she finds herself drawn into their world of privilege and power, all while wondering if the truth she’s searching for might lead her right back to Dovermere…to face the fate she was never meant to escape.