Upon a Starlit Tide

"Kell Woods is an Australian author who I’d never read before. Upon a Starlit Tide is really fun. I don’t know if I’d call it full fantasy, it’s more like magical realism . It takes place in 1750s Brittany, and it’s a delightful mash-up of the Cinderella story and The Little Mermaid. Again, it’s the story of an orphan girl who is adopted into a very wealthy family. She’s the youngest of three sisters, and their father is a shipbuilder. The story begins the morning after a terrible storm, when a sailor has been washed onto shore. Technically, he’s off-shore and she swims out to rescue him. That sets into motion this entire series of events where she begins to question who she is and where she came from, and what secrets her parents aren’t telling her. Then you have this delightful conflict with the step-sisters—or in this case, the adoptive sisters—and all their rivalries and tensions. There’s a delightful love triangle as well. You’ve got Lucinda, the young woman at the heart of the story, the sailor she’s just rescued, and then a privateer she’s been friends with for most of her life. And, of course, you have the occasional fantastical being that is just there in the story as if that is the most normal, logical thing in the world—to have a conversation with a garden fairy. I loved this book. It reminded me why fantasy novels are my comfort food. When I want to escape and just block out the world, I will pick up something like a historical fantasy. She did such a great job of blending these fairy tales. If you are going to blend genres, I actually think that historical fiction and fantasy are a perfect match. They work so well together. You already have to do all the world-building, you’re already asking your reader to step outside everything that they are familiar with. So putting them together is natural. I think that’s why Game of Thrones did so well. It’s historical and fantastical at the same time. There’s a part of us that just wants to be taken away. We want the battles, the epic love stories, the rivalries, the conflicts between good and evil. It’s a winning combination."