Upon a Starlit Tide - Kell Woods - ★★.½

AUTHOR: Kell Woods

NARRATOR: Esther Wane

GENRE: Historical Fantasy, Retelling.

PUBLICATION DATE: February 12, 2025.

RATING: 2.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: A historical fantasy taking inspiration from Cinderella and The Little Mermaid. The content is distinctly adult, but the writing style leans towards YA/NA, leading to flat characters, half-baked fantastical elements, and a romance/attraction-dominated plot. The ending saved my rating to some extent. Might be better for those who like YA/NA romance because the fantasy was disappointing. This is an outlier opinion.

Plot Preview:

1758. Brittany, France. Lucinda Leon aka Luce, the youngest daughter of a wealthy ship owner in the port city of Saint-Malo, dreams of joining a ship’s crew and navigating the oceans, unlike her two older sisters whose obsessions are more typical: fancy clothing and a suitable marriage. The only one who knows about Luce’s desire is her best friend, a fugitive English smuggler named Samuel, who is secretly teaching her to sail.

One morning, Luce ends up rescuing the scion of the richest shipping family from the sea. This creates many changes in her immediate plans as she hopes to attend the ball his family has thrown in honour of his safe return. Around the same time as these events, the local fae are disappearing from Saint-Malo, the English threaten attack, and Luce’s past finally catches up with her.

The story comes to us in Luce’s third-person perspective.

Bookish Yays:

🧜🏻‍♀️ The description of the setting of Saint-Malo and its various locations, whether occupied by humans or fantastical creatures – quite immersive.

🧜🏻‍♀️ The ending, with some pretty good reveals. It is somewhat anticlimactic, but that probably helped me. Not sure about how other readers would feel about this, though.

🧜🏻‍♀️ Quite a few good themes that are incorporated without the book feeling overloaded - class discrimination, colonialism, war mongering and profiteering are the ones best handled. There are shades of feminism also, but this could have been better.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🚢 The idea of merging Cinderella and The Little Mermaid into a single story and making a convincing combo is brilliant. The implementation, though, is quite compartmentalised, with the Cinderella part being more dominant in the first half and the mermaid content coming more prominently in the second half. That said, the overall plot isn’t just a merger of the two stories but an independent plot with just some loose inspiration from the fairy tales. The Little Mermaid elements are still okay, but the Cinderella content is bland. Ensuring that a wealthy girl gets to a ball in a fabulous new dress because she lost her fabulous original dress isn't Cinderella – the struggle and the emotional pain is missing.

🚢 Luce as a character is fairly interesting, except for the scenes where she is romantically muddled. (More on this in the Nays.) However, her depiction is mostly one-noted, with her attraction being thumped into our face multiple times, and with no flaws shown in her personality. It gets annoying after a bit. Plus she seems to be dominated by her heart than her head, which might make sense for her age (whatever age it was – somewhere in her late teens, I guess. I don’t recollect any mention of the characters’ ages) but results in some naïve decisions.

🚢 The historical feel is somewhat mixed. There is excellent research of the time period, creating an alternate history where actual historical events have been combined with fantastical causes. However, the dialogues rarely feel historical. There is a lot of casualness to the conversations, even when it is between men and women or people of different classes. The interactions thus don’t seem believable.

🚢 Luce’s family dynamics had great potential to be memorable: a wealthy father who is openly biased towards his youngest, a mother who is determined to get her daughters titled husbands to continue her own noble legacy, and two elder sisters who are fond of Luce but also jealous of her. Unfortunately, most of the character development is so flat that any behavioural changes feel abrupt.

🚢 Some interesting kinds of fae folk in the plot, but not much backstory. The fantastical content is mostly surface-level.

🚢 The pacing is terribly off. There is hardly anything happening at the start, with the initial one-third just providing a background to the main plot. Even when things are happening, it feels like the proceedings are dragged. Only the ending gets a proper tempo.

Bookish Nays:

👠 Thanks to the book cover and the mention of the Little Mermaid and some other details in the blurb, we readers get to know an important character’s fishy [pun intended] secret much before everyone else (including the character herself) does. Moreover, the mermaid content is not as extensive as I would have imagined from the cover.

👠 The book seems confused about its target audience. Most of the writing style seems very YA, especially in the shallow character development and the simplistic and predictable plotting. However, there are a couple of gruesome scenes in the final quarter that won't be suitable to younger readers at all. The spice level is also more NA/Adult, and none of the steamy scenes were crucial to the plot. There is one make-out scene right at the start (literally within the first five minutes of the audiobook) that comes out of nowhere and doesn’t make any sense given the characters involved. Can’t forget the abundant cuss words, some of which are blasphemous. Historical works cannot get away with anachronous foul language.

👠 The part that makes the book seem most YA is the abundant sprinklings of thoughts of desire and attraction and anatomical attributes even in between tense scenes. This is always the easiest way to pull me out of a narrative.

👠 The unexpected love triangle, and even worse, the lack of conflict or tension in the triangle. It is very clear from the start which ‘candidate’ Luce would swerve towards, which makes a triangle boring. Moreover, neither of the two men were appealing, both being stereotypical in their own ways. As it is, I hate the triangle trope, but when it involves such characters, it’s even more exasperating. Luce’s constant mental swerving between the two males is also an irritant.

🎧 The Audiobook Experience:

The audiobook, clocking at 14 hours 8 min, is narrated by Esther Wane. I am sorry to say that I absolutely did not like the narration. In my five years of listening to audiobooks, I have never allowed my opinion of the narrator to affect my judgement of the plot. But this is the first time when I am unsure if I disliked the book even more because of the narrator. I was not at all a fan of her character voices. The girls sounded shrill and somewhat kiddish, thereby very grating on the ears. But the male voices were even worse. Every single man sounded like a senior citizen! It took me a long while to accept that the two men in the love triangle who sounded so gruff were actually young characters. In all honesty, I cannot recommend the audiobook.

Overall, I did like the concept of this dual fairytale retelling, but the insipid character development, the boring love triangle, and the hyper-focus on physical appeal & attraction killed my enjoyment. The audio narration was a further dampener. I *might* have liked the book a tad better if I had read it, but I am pretty sure it would not have ended up as a favourite even then.

Mine is very much an outlier opinion, so please read through other reviews and take a more informed call on this novel. If I have to recommend it, it would be to NA readers who enjoy romantic triangles and fairytale-based plots.

2.5 stars, rounding down wherever applicable for the audio version.

My thanks to Macmillan Audio and Bolinda Audio for providing the ALC of “The Starlit Tide” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook. Sorry this didn’t work better for me.