(courtesy Harper Collins Australia)
It has oft been noted that there is nothing new under the sun, and while the Bible got the ball rolling on that one, plenty of others have taken up the cry that try as we might to be creatively original or to dream up a thought without precedent, the truth is that there is only so much reality to go around and the odds of repeating it is high.
That applies to storytelling as much as anything which is why when someone defies the odds and comes up with something truly and impactfully their own, based on two already-existing stories no less (plus a few other admitted influences), it is all the more remarkable.
Kell Woods, who previously dazzled us with After the Forest, which provided a brilliantly fresh and incredibly involving take on Hansel and Gretel, complete with a powerful perspective on female empowerment, has done it again with Upon a Starlit Tide, which primarily draws for its primary influences on classic fairytales, “The Little Mermaid” and “Cinderella” (in addition to some Breton folktales).
But while the influences are deliberately clear, what Woods weaves around them with impressive mastery and a thoughtfully empathetic eye to real human experience, and not one imprisoned by social convention and stultifying edict, is nothing less than stunningly brilliant, a story of one woman’s quest to live life on her terms and how she deals with the how quickly her understanding of what those terms are changes.
‘Clumsy as ever, I see,’ he had teased, moving back for the tiller. As though he [Samuel] had not, for one brief moment, held Luce against him with heart-stopping tenderness. As though he had not, for one brief moment, pressed his cheek to her hair.
Its 1758 in the stupendously rich Brittany port of Saint-Malo, where despite the fury of the war with the British, much if taking place in the close-by and narrow confines of La Manche aka the English Channel, a small grouping of aristocratic families are doing more than very nicely thank you very much, Lucinde Léon is trying her hardest to live as free a life as being the daughter of a wealthy French shipping magnate allows.
Hers is a world, along with her older sisters, Veronique and Charlotte, of balls and dresses, of women marrying early and well and of life lived in tight lanes of convention and social acceptability with any deviation from the norm seen as some sort of socially disgraceful sin.
It is, by any measure, a constrictive world, and Lucinde aka Luce’s solution is to steal out at dawn in men’s clothing and either wander along the beach, swim or spend time with her best friend, an English smuggler named Samuel, whose very presence in her life in any form is a serious strike against the social good, at least as it is defined by Saint-Malo’s spectacularly unimaginative aristocratic elite.
Sinning against the rigidly set social order Luce may be, but she cannot do anything but seek freedom, driven by an impulse which values agency and an individualistic life far more than highly than wearing in-season silk dresses or securing the best possible marriage to the most desirable of suitors.
(Dymocks’ Books in Bars event, 11 March 2025 at East Village Sydney)
She is, in essence, a rebel but not a thoughtless one, and you fall in love with Luce as Upon a Starlit Tide progresses simply because she has empathy, heart and a desire to live a life that means something and which values people as something other than pawns in an endless quest for social betterment.
Her world changes completely though one morning when she rescues a shipwrecked man from a restlessly pounding surf, her act of kindness and bravery, which a woman should absolutely not undertake, leading to a series of events where the very things she loves and desires most are threatened with being overrun by those she most clearly and manifestly does not.
Her world of sailing with Samuel and immersing herself in the natural world where faeries and their magic are still a vital, if declining (thanks to human greed), part of the landscape, is suddenly largely replaced by glittering social events and an eye to a fabricated future which does not easily with her, and while there is some attraction in giving in to the power of social convention, it wars with the part of her war that sees right through it to the emotional emptiness beyond.
But Upon a Starlit Tide is far more than simply, though what a gloriously good and substantial “simply” it is (!), that one late eighteenth-century’s teen quest to be her own person in a world that takes a very dim of such wanton self determination.
‘Then there really is nothing we can do,’ she said wearily. With the contracts signed, Veronique and [redacted to avoid spoilers] were as good as married.
No fleet, no storm, could protect her sister now.
It is also clarion call for all of us to consider what happens to others if we pursue our own enrichment and happiness at the expense of others.
Much of the emotional impact of Upon a Starlit Tide flows from its affectingly executed idea that while the world revolves, for too great a part, on exploitation and misuse of the earth and those who find themselves in less powerful positions, that that does not make it right.
Great sins have been committed by people down throughout history pursuing their wellness and security at someone else’s expense, and astonishingly Luce finds herself discovering that her own story sits less with the users, abusers and victors than it does with those they have thoughtlessly used for their own ends.
Quite what that means must be left to the narrative, social and emotional richness of Upon a Starlit Tide which may wear its influences very much on its carefully-fashioned silk dress sleeves, but which uses them in ways that delight and surprise and massively impact you at every turn.
An enchanting story that thrives on magic and possibility and which celebrates the power of agency over unthinking adherence to convention, Upon a Starlit Tide is a masterfully moving body of work, written with poetic beauty and emotional vulnerability, which has a brave and unique woman at its heart, someone who takes what she knows and what she remarkably discovers about herself and forges a sparklingly meaningful future for herself, often at great cost, and for those around her, in ways that mean the world as she knows it will never be the same again.