Have you ever come across lunar magic before? We haven’t!

With this beautiful cover and the promise of dark academia meeting lunar magic, ‘Curious Tides’ had to have a starring role in season seven. This was one of our most anticipated reads of the end of 2023 so we’re incredibly excited to get to discover it for the podcast.

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...

Can this possibly deliver everything it’s promising and hit the right dark academia notes?

In this episode we discuss:

• Love triangles and how it age brackets a novel

• The power of protagonist perspective and how we would have preferred different ones

• ‘Curious Tides’ by Pascal Lacelle

• ‘The Atlas Six’ by Olivie Blake

• ‘Ninth House’ by Leigh Bardugo

• ‘Fourth Wing’ by Rebecca Yarros

• ‘A Deadly Education’ by Naomi Novik

• ‘House of Night’ by PC and Kristin Cast

• ‘The Morganville Vampires’ by Rachel Caine

• ‘Twilight’ by Stephenie Meyer

• ‘True Blood’/’The Southern Vampire Mysteries’ by Charlaine Harris

• ‘Empire of the Vampire’ by Jay Kristoff

• ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ (2001)

If you fancy taking a chance on ‘Curious Tides’, we’d love it if you considered using our bookshop.org link below to purchase your copy of the book which helps us fund ‘The Dark Academicals’ and gives back to independent bookshops at no extra cost to you.

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