Patricia Morais' 'Tides' is a fun and scary read

 Title: Tides - Ada Hughes Novella

Author: Patricia Morais

Published: June 8, 2022

Pages: 80

Genre: YA Fantasy

Buy Tides

What Goodreads has to say:

Years before Lilly Ashton was recruited, Ada Hughes had already caught the eye of the demon hunters. But what led Ada, the quiet and sweet girl from Diabolus Venator, to be recruited to fight supernatural creatures?

When children start to go missing in a fishing town, Ada Hughes starts to fear for her two little brothers’ safety. Tide Springs was never really safe for them but she has a plan to escape their toxic family environment.

While battling her own loneliness and ignoring her forbidden love, Ada is faced with one more unexpected twist. Mythological beings and an ancient demon-hunting order will change her life forever.

She is suddenly afflicted with questions… Is this a new reality or just a hallucination? Will she be able to face this new world while being confronted with the secrets of her hometown?

What I have to say:

Who loves a good spooky read? Me! (And hopefully you too.) 

This year I got to kick off spooky season in just the right way: by reading a creepy book about monsters! (And also visiting the best cemetery ever, aka, Sleepy Hollow, but that's a story for another day.)

I'll start with the obvious: this does not look like a spooky book about monsters. From the cover and the tagline, I'd guess it's a coming of age story featuring some family drama and messy love triangles. 

Now the book does indeed have all those things, but it also has a vampiric sea creature, a disturbing murder, and a pair of sassy monster hunters. The author manages to weave all these threads together in a seamless, suspenseful narrative I couldn't put down.

At the start of the story, Ada Hughes is dealing with an abusive father, trying to save enough money to fight for custody of her two younger brothers, and feeling conflicted about her feelings for her best friend's boyfriend. This is all pretty engaging by itself, so I definitely wasn't bored. But the real action didn't pick up until a few chapters in. Then things really got going, and from that point on, my eyes were basically glued to the page. 

While I did feel the final climactic battle scene could have lasted a bit longer, overall I have no solid complaints about this story. It was fast-paced, fun, and just the right amount of creepy. 

I also appreciated the complex characters and their equally complex feelings and dynamics. Ada's conflicted emotions about things like her father and her friends' relationship made her feel very real, and I was rooting for her from pretty much the first page. There was also some real tragedy that never got reversed, which, again, made it feel very real and valid as an origin story. 

In my opinion, those are some of the elements that make for a really good horror story, whether on the page, stage, or screen: characters with complex psychology and real tragedy in their past.

And, of course, scary-as-heck monsters.

On that note (MINOR SPOILER ALERT): I do love a good lamia and was very excited when one showed up in this book. 

So all around, kudos to the author for a good monster story well told.

Postscript: yes, this is a prequel and no, you do not have to have read any of the other books in the series to understand or enjoy it. I hadn't and I loved it.

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