There is a scholar on these shores who breathes stories. He inhales all manner of them, holds each one in his soul, and when his lungs are too full of words, he exhales at last, daring to breathe his own stories to life. Thus he breathes in words and breathes more out, in and out and in again like the measured rhythm of the sea, until one day he finds a peculiar book that sets even the tides off their fated course.

curious tides by pascale lacelle.

Book Notes: Fantasy Roundup

Or, some ideas for what to read when you have a book hangover from Iron Flame:

Curious Tides by Pascale Lacelle

When Emory is the sole survivor of a secret ritual in the caves below Aldryn College, her healer powers, given to those born during the new moon on a rising tide, begin to shift into something strange and uncontrollable. Will her estranged friend Baz, brother to one of the students who died, help Emory figure out her new powers and what really happened that night? This debut fantasy has it all — dark academia, an upper YA that crosses over beautifully into adult, a murder mystery, secret societies, forbidden magic, a pining romance and the most gorgeous book design I’ve seen in a while. The magic system is built around the moon phases and the tides. Curious Tides is book one of a planned duology.

The Hurricane Wars by Thea Guanzon

What happens when Talasyn and Alaric, two soldiers from opposite sides of an entrenched war meet on the battlefield and discover their opposing powers combine to create something entirely new and unexpected? They continue to absolutely hate each other while having to work together to save their people from an even worse fate. Of course. And we all know what happens when two attractive people hate each other. Drawing inspiration from Southeast Asia, debut Filipino author Thea Guanzon has penned a fun, fresh fantasy that balances an authentic depiction of the toll of conflict on a population with a strong cast of characters and all the political machinations of Machiavelli. The Hurricane Wars is book one of a planned trilogy.

Godkiller by Hannah Kane

In a world where gods, fed by the attention, prayers, and offerings of humans, can also be destroyed by them, three disparate people come together to travel to the ruined city that was the last stand in the wars between gods and people. Kissen, a godkiller for hire. Elo, a former knight turned baker. And Inara, a young girl whose life has become intertwined with a god of white lies, Skedi. The four travel together to Blenraden, hopeful that they will find a way to untangle Skedi from Inara. All the feels of quest fantasy with characters that are delightfully flawed and human. The world building was immersive and queer normative with a host of diverse characters. The religious and magic system was at once familiar but with enough twists to make it unexpected. Godkiller is book one of a planned trilogy.

The Fragile Threads of Power by V.E. Schwab

From page one of The Fragile Threads of Power, I was invested all over again in the world of the four Londons, seven years after the events from The Shades of Magic trilogy (also excellent, if you want to start there). The plot works together like interchanging gears, or a chess game, the movement of each character affecting the others, often unknowingly. There are characters from the original trilogy, new additions, and Tes, the one who, unconsciously, holds the key to everything. Schwab investigates power in this novel -- who has it and who controls it, and by whose standards its morality is judged. Schwab puts a lot of things in motion in this book, and only a few are resolved by the end. The Fragile Threads of Power is book one of planned trilogy. You can always go back and read The Shades of Magic series in the meantime!

What the River Knows by Isabel Ibañez

I can’t think of a more fun combination than 1880’s Egyptian archeological digs, a feisty heroine determined to find out what happened to her explorer parents, and a current of magic running through it all. When Inez Olivera hears that her parents, on a dig in Egypt, are presumed dead, she takes matters into her own hands. Inez books passage from Bolivia to Egypt, intent on discovering the truth. What she finds in Egypt is an infuriatingly handsome young man, assisting her guardian in carrying on her parents discoveries, and men thwarting her inquiries at every turn. Add to this a mysterious ring that connects Inez to the magic of the past and the questions continue to pile up. It will take a trip up the Nile and many near escapes just to get Inez closer to any answers. Packed with action, a slow burn romance, and a huge twist kept me enthralled to the very last page. What the River Knows is book one of a planned YA duology.

Hopefully you find one, or many, of these titles to be a satisfying read!

— Lori

I’m broke.

I was gonna do something- um

HPB haul 11/20/23 and other books

I ordered books online through Amazon today (Yeah, I know. I know. Bezos sucks), but then I went to Half Price Books looking for some things I was hoping to find locally and for less $.

So... I got this stuff today at HPB.

A Flame Tree edition of Don Quixote, more Flame Tree collection books, a reproduction of the original A Christmas Carol, American Gods, and a book-theme jigsaw 🧩 puzzle 🧩 that's just as shiny as the Flame Tree books.

I noticed that the really nice edition of Don Quixote was abridged, which I find silly, but I still wanted it... so I also bought a really cheap old copy that's unabridged. Also got some journals, Bukowski's Notes of a Dirty Old Man, Jane Austen's Persuasion, Sword Catcher, The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, and Curious Tides. I'm not familiar with those last three new works, but they look fun, and the wizard one was apparently a very well-funded kickstarter project.

Then I went to the back of the store to look at the old, fine binding books and had to slap myself to put some of them back on the shelf. But I allowed myself one title, for now: Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Rabelais.... Yes, the likely origin of "Do what thou wilt".

Lots of books to post later, when they arrive.

Oh, and I recently bought a cute little TST book from their own website: Goodnight Baphomet and it's freaking precious. It just teaches the 7 tenets of TST in a simple way, through rhyme and cute illustrations.

FYI, a guy at HPB told me about an app that lets you keep track of books (really any collection item that has an isbn#). Because I told him I ended up with two copies of the same edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall...

...and I'd started using pics of book purchases to help me avoid extra copies. It'll let you create collection titles then let you add items within each collection. It has categories for books, video games, music, and movies, but I made a collection called "Jigsaw puzzles" and just scanned them in as if they were books. The app can be found in the App Store as "libib".

Collections I've created, so far. I've barely started scanning things in. I'm not sure what to do about the occasional book so old it lacks an isbn.... 🤔

Edit: the manual entry option lets you enter title, author, description, etc., even if you don't have an isbn or upc.

“The master of nightmares and the boy plagued by too many fears.” -Curious Tides, page 358.

I decided not to add any color to this for now, but I might go back and add in some color later.

Curious Tides Book Review

Curious Tides by Pascale Lacelle Book Review 

This book has so many things to love. 

Too bad I disliked almost all of them because of other glaring issues in the book. 

I still give Lacelle so much credit. Her book had so many dreams (literally) and tried to tackle so much for a debut YA novel. However, I really think she could have benefited from a more succinct editor, by changing up her timeline, and by shearing off a good 200 pages or so. 

This book’s plot is ambitious. It switches POV’s between two main characters: Emory and Baz. Emory, a student at Aldryn College, specializes in healing powers. Used to being mediocre and constantly standing in the shadows of her best friend, Romie, Emory is suddenly the recipient of every power after a near death experience that leaves several dead, including Romie.

However, in the aftermath of the event, Emory learns that she’s a mythical tidecaller. Baz meanwhile, is an eclipse-born, a person who receives his powers from being born on a lunar eclipse.

Known for their horrific and “evil” powers that combust in an event called “collapsing”, Baz is ostracized and alienated by the other students at Aldryn, but also the world at large for his incredible, but frightening ability to control time (another big issue that I won’t even get into). 

The setting of this book is a world based on the idea that people receive abilities depending on the moon they were born under. There’s lore galore, colleges dedicated to honing special abilities, rituals, language, and mythology–all based on the tides and the moon. 

The details that Lacelle includes in this is really interesting, as is the concept of magic based on the moon phases itself. A dark academia setting based on the tides and lunar alignments? I love it.

However, the magic system was needlessly complicated and Lacelle spent way too much time describing events, world-building facets, and societal elements that had nothing to do with the plot and only succeeded in making the book longer instead of pulling me into the story more deeply. 

In addition, a lot of Lacelle’s writing was incredibly repetitive. She hit the same points over and over and over again: eclipse-born are evil and everyone hates them, everyone loves the moon, Kieran is hot, Romie is great, Baz’s memory of his father’s printing press blowing up, Emory feeling inadequate compared to Romie, and Baz thinking or describing the children’s book Sorrow of the Drowned Gods. 

No joke, the items I listed up above were about 75% of the book. The remaining 25% was action, too-in depth details about the college that didn’t matter—like what all the different halls were called and what they looked like in each dormitory, more flashbacks of Emory and Baz’s past, and interactions between the characters. 

Even though Emory and Baz are at a college, their classes don’t matter whatsoever. Honestly, I have no idea why they’re even at a college other than to have them all in one place. Emory’s classes are described once, briefly, and we see her go to about two classes. Otherwise, it’s not mentioned at all. 

The characters themselves were okay. Not great. Just…okay. Lacelle tried way, way too hard to give her characters depth, but only succeeded in telling instead of showing.

Instead of me figuring something out about Emory, Lacelle would have a huge, descriptive paragraph of Emory realizing that she compared herself to Romie too much and that she had her own self-worth. Moments like this aren’t bad per se, but they were way too frequent for my liking. 

Let me, the reader, figure things out about the characters and come to my own conclusions. Don’t spell out every single detail for me and hold my hand. It’s tedious and it’s boring. Lacelle did this constantly. 

In addition, for a nearly 600-paged book, about four characters mattered: Emory, Baz, Kieran, and Kai. Emory and Baz are the main characters so it’s hard to discount them, even though they’re not that interesting due to having every single personality trait of theirs spelled out and analyzed by the author itself. 

Kieran and Kai, although important characters, were very one-dimensional. Kieran’s power-obsessed manipulative personality was not a secret whatsoever.

Lacelle reveals his “true” nature at the climactic end, even though the signs showing his megalomania were painfully clear to a ten-year-old. 

I liked Kai the most, but he’s in very little of the book. We see him mainly in flashbacks and then at the very end. Lacelle, why lock up your most interesting characters and hide them away for most of the novel?? She does this with Romie too, a more egregious error. 

Romie dying is the catalyst for this whole story. It’s what changes Emory and makes her a tidecaller, it’s what invigorates Kieran and sets him on his master plan, it’s what influences Kai to collapse—the whole story starts with Romie dying at Doveremere Cave. 

Yet…Lacelle starts the story after this event. Why would an author do this??? It’s excruciating. Your most important part of the whole novel isn’t even included in the novel. She inserts it later as a flashback, but I don’t want a flashback. I want the real thing. 

The book should have started with Romie and Emory going to Dovermere and then 

progress from there. It easily could have been the first chapter and it would have introduced us to Romie’s character more, set up Romie and Emory’s friendship, and acted as the catalyst for the whole story. 

Even better, it could have even started with Baz’s memory of his father’s printing press blowing up, then the three of them starting at Aldryn, them going to Dovermere, Romie dying, and thennnnn continuing.

That already would have been a better book. It wouldn’t even have to be longer. By cutting out all the repetitive and useless bits that I already mentioned, Lacelle would have had plenty of room to include these essential moments. 

I truly don’t understand the choices she (or her editor) made about the plot timeline and pacing because they were all terrible.

This is a true injustice when you take into account how original and fascinating the initial concept is and how much time and effort she put into the world and its lore. 

Recommendation: This book had all the right ingredients for something truly great, but fell short due to verbose, albeit beautiful writing, a slow plot, choppy pacing, predictable characters, and too dense world-building that added nothing to the story.

If you want dark academia, look elsewhere like If We Were Villains or the Atlas Paradox. These stories have much better plots with much more interesting characters and it doesn’t take 600 pages to get to the end. 

Score: 4/10

Curious Tides by Pascale Lacelle is getting some hate for being slow and drawn out but y’all… some books are just like that and are part of the style (the Hobbit anyone?). Same with criticisms toward timeline confusion (except I don’t think it was hard to follow at all and liked how the backstory was intertwined with the present). It’s like Ninth House meets Gideon the Ninth meets Shadow and Bone.

I LOVED this book. I loved the premise and the world building and I loved that it being long drew out the sense of suspense and confusion as if we were experiencing the world with Emory and Baz. I liked learning more about the magic system and the Order and the characters.

I think my biggest complaints from this book are the lack of expansion on esclipses. Hear me out: there’s solar and lunar eclipses but what are the specific variations that lead to some being Tidecallers? What’s the difference between being born on a solar eclipse and being born on a specific variation of it; what’s the variation?? Also college was talked about early on but whatever happened to Emory taking her classes, especially the emphasis on her needing a makeup exam. College helps set the tone for prestige which is great for world building, but there’s aside from the beginning, there’s not really any mention of classes or homework.

Yes these complaints override the positives for some people but for me, these are easily justified. I really liked this book and I loved the ending and epilogue and I can’t wait to learn more in Stranger Skies. Like. I really need someone to talk to about how much I loved this book.

sometimes I go look at reviews for a book and get relieved that other people are finding it to be a certain way too. Currently reading Curious Tides by Pascale Lacelle (which I read about 25% of and then put down for a while last year) and it's not bad, I am enjoying it. but it IS slow. and that's okay, so far I don't think I'd get rid of anything but it's just not gripping me the way I want a book to do right now

Book Review - Curious Tides

Hello, everyone! I have had absolutely no motivation for blogging recently, which is why this post is publishing so late in the evening. Things will likely be sporadic for a while, but I’m trying to avoid a full hiatus because of all the ARCs I need to review. I’m very excited to talk about this book, though, because it was one of my most anticipated reads of the fall season. Read on to find out…

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Rating: 1/5

Book Blurb: Ninth House meets A Deadly Education in this gorgeous dark academia fantasy following a teen mage who must unravel the truth behind the secret society that may have been involved in her classmates’ deaths.

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.

Review:

In a world where people are gifted with different types of magics that correlate with the tides/moon phase, a teen mage must unravel the secret behind the death of her former friend and the secret society that she was caught up in. Emory is a student at the prestigious Aldryn College for Lunar magics, yet her healing magic is mediocare at best. Yet what happened to her the previous summer haunts her, what happened when she stumbles in on her ex best friend and a group of the most talented students committing a ritual that results in everyone dying but Emory.... she can't remember what happened or why and she'll do anything to figure it out. The only problem is that her own magic has changed since that incident and now she is discovering she has forbidden magic and that the only person to help her is the school's most reclusive student and her former best friend's brother. As Emory seeks answers she'll find herself drawn into the secret society and a world of privelege and power. Unfortunately for me this book fell completely flat after the 30% mark. I tried and tried to make this book work but I was completely bored and it was such a trudge to make it to the end. This book was SLOW and so long for no reason whatsoever. It's the first book in the series and I am not interested in continuing it at all. Emory is so annoying and there is literally NO chemistry between any of the characters. The mystery itself was boring and I really wish it wasn't. This book was advertised as Ninth House meets A Deadly Education, two book series that I absolutely adore and yet this one completely missed the mark in all cases. The characters weren't interesting, the mystery felt lacking, the pacing was clunky and slow, and honestly this kind of felt like a mess. I pushed myself to finish this books in hopes that it would get better, yet it didn't. Maybe it's a case of "its me not you" but for a book that features a magical school, murder mystery, and some romance, it should have been perfect for me yet it just wasn't. If you enjoy super slow magical school mystery stories then give this a go, maybe it'll work for you.

*Thanks Netgalley and Simon and Schuster Children's Publishing, Margaret K. McElderry Books for sending me an arc in exchange for an honest review*

A warrior sprang from this world as improbably as the flowers that bloom in its arid wilderness. She was not a warrior at first, but something else she does not care to remember. (A sword does not recall the lump of metal it came from; it knows only the hand that wields it and the sun that kisses its blade and the life that bleeds at its fateful end.)

Curious Tides by Pascale Lacelle

OKAY! ILL MAKE IT A THING!

p1/ p2

Based off of this post :>

I’m working on a page dedicated to Kai and Baz from a book called Curious Tides! I thought this book was great, but I definitely enjoyed the second half of it more than the first half. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with the cast in the second book!

Also, I would love to see more of Baz and Kai in book 2!

@noshirdalal you see this, I am actually super invested in Mr Savarimuthu and would love to know more about him and I was curious, if you can share, when is Raj's birthday? Asking for a friend (we definitely don't have a bet going on on Rajan's zodiac sign)