Recommendations from our site
“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. 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.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in the 18th Century
Ariel Lawhon, Novelist
