Curious Tides

Curious Tides 

By Pascale Lacelle

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.

Curious Tides can be summed up in one word: it's boring. It was boring when I read the first few chapters, it was boring when I was halfway through, it was mildly interesting at the end, and when I finished it and read the teaser for the next book in the series, I found myself completely uninterested in following up. In fact, not only do I keep forgetting that I've finished it, I've been forgetting that I've read it at all. In fact, when I was writing this review, I kept typing the title as "Cursed Tides" because I was getting it confused with another book.

If you look through other reviews there's two common complaints: one, even by those who ended up liking it, is that it's very slow to start. I agree. Somehow the author has taken a scenario in which our protagonist washes up on shore with four dead bodies and made it ... uncompelling. 

Second, people find Emory, our ostensible hero, annoying. I also agree with this, and with the person who says Emory comes across super young, and possibly was aged up to 19 just so a sex scene could be included (although I have no idea why, since that was also boring to read). Emory is the kind of person who somehow inherits a mysterious power that we're told is incredibly dangerous and could lead to her destruction and the death of other around her, like a bomb, and when her friend Baz, whom she's harassed into helping train her surreptitiously, tells her to call it a night, she tells him he's being too cautious and she just starts using it willy-nilly. And it's all okay! Absolutely nothing happens as a result of this idiotic decision. She won't tell Baz crucial information about that night, but shares everything with Kieran, because he...keeps looking at her meaningfully, I guess.

I don't know if Emory was meant to be as annoying as she was, but she consistently uses Baz (and his crush on her) to get him to do things for her, she beelines for this secret society despite secret societies always being bad news, falls hard for this Kieran kid who is clearly using her, assumes her 'friend' Penelope has ratted on her to the dean even though Penelope literally knows nothing, MOPES about every damn thing, even the fact that her best friend got invited to this secret society and didn't tell her, like she isn't doing the exact same damn thing, and at no point is she written like these are the actions of an asshole. Does she get an indefinite pass because her friend disappeared after doing a stupid ritual for a secret society? Because Romie was Baz's sister and he didn't come across as an asshole. It's like the author has to have Emory do all this for the book's plot, but then didn't want to have her be an antihero, so instead we all have to pretend her actions are forgiveable.

The third thing I didn't like about the book, which wasn't necessarily something others agreed with me on, was the magic system.  Lacelle sets it up with four moons (full, waxing, waning, and new) and each of these has like four "specialties", like soultending and wardcrafting and purifying and lightkeeping and dreaming and unraveling and memorists and reaping and amplifying and wordsmiths and sowing and glamouring and darkbearing and shadow guiding and healers and seers, and then there's also eclipses which also have separate powers and now we're at, like 20+ random powers (and which is which and who is what are RELEVANT to the plot, so you gotta try to remember all this shit) PLUS there's some fairy tale book about the powers being taken over by shadow which is also important except that it was introduced in the first chapter with all this other stuff and I promptly forgot. So the whole villain's motivation is like, making a path between worlds and undoing stuff about the four original moon gods, but none of it ever made much sense to me. There's tides and water magic and fake magic that comes from siphoned off stuff from people who have Collapsed, but also apparently after you collapse you're super strong but this is a complete secret. Anyway, there was a lot to keep straight and I had no interest in doing so.

What else can I say? It's already forgotten.

16: A Book Set In Or Around A Body Of Water