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Magical Worlds: A Guest Post by Pascale Lacelle

By Pascale Lacelle / October 11, 2024 at 1:46 am

If you’ve ever been drawn to the wonders of the moon, this book is for you. An atmospheric dark academia fantasy set at the prestigious Aldryn College for Lunar Magics, our YA Monthly Pick is a dazzling tale. Discover the magic behind the scenes of Curious Tides in Pascale Lacelle’s guest post, down below.

Paperback $13.99

Curious Tides (B&N Exclusive Edition)

By Pascale Lacelle

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Paperback $13.99

Dark magic abounds in this intoxicatingly atmospheric fantasy universe that is meticulously built and refreshingly real. Fans of Chloe Gong and Tracy Deonn will adore this, both for the tremendous sense of place and for the authentic cast of characters.

Curious Tides was largely inspired by my love of portal fantasy books such as The Starless Sea, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, and The Magicians. There’s something deeply compelling about characters discovering magical worlds they never thought could exist, especially when it’s something they’ve read about in books.

I was particularly drawn to the academic setting of The Magicians and other dark academia favorites such as Ninth House. For Curious Tides, I had this seaside setting in mind—more specifically, a school where students keep disappearing in mysterious sea caves, swallowed by the tide. And because the tide is intricately linked to the moon, it made sense for these students to wield magic influenced by both. That’s how Curious Tides’ magic system—the sacred lunar houses and their tidal alignments—came about.

Given the academic setting, I wanted to create a complex magic system that would sort people into different “houses” based on what moon phase they were born on—kind of like the zodiac signs, but for moon phases. There are four main lunar houses: House New Moon, House Waxing Moon, House Full Moon, and House Waning Moon. And since there are two low tides and two high tides a day, each lunar house has four different alignments, or possible magical abilities, dictated by the tide level at the time of someone’s birth. This means people are born with only one magical ability, which they can only access whenever their ruling moon phase comes around.

Then I had to ask myself what an eclipse might mean in a world that revolves around the moon. Would it cause anomalies in their lunar magic? Would the mythology surrounding eclipses be steeped in fear because of this? That’s how the fifth house, House Eclipse, came to be. Those born on ecliptic events are the outsiders of this magical society because of the rarity and strangeness of eclipses, and the often-deadly nature of their gifts—which they can access freely, no matter the moon phase.

Creating this magic system was my favorite part of the whole writing process for Curious Tides. All the different abilities had to embody the symbolism and spiritual meaning behind their corresponding moon phase, so I did a lot of research there and drew connections that made sense to me.

Adding limitations and rules to the magic system also helped inform the plot. It got me asking: if someone wanted to wield more than the single magical ability they were born with, how far would they go to gain more power—to wield all the lunar magics as their own? This is something we explore throughout Curious Tides, and again in its sequel, Stranger Skies—in which the characters go to extremes to find the gods who might help them break free of the limitations put on their magic.