Macon Reviews Redux: Night Tide by Anna Burke
Anna Burke's Night Tide is my favorite enemies to lovers book of all time. This is why.
When asked what my favorite all time Sapphic Romance series is I always respond Anna Burke’s Seal Cove Series. I have never cared it wasn’t finished, the first two books were exceptional, the world building is on another level, and a part of me simply will never leave Seal Cove. As a Benefactor of Burke’s Patreon I received an early digital copy of the long awaited final book in the series: Windlass. It is… everything I wanted it to be and more. Truly exceptional. I could not be more excited about it and am going to write so much more as soon as I get my heart and head around the experience. And read it another time or two. You can and should preorder Windlass, it releases on July 7, 2025. As I read Windlass, I was reminded of how incredible Burke is as a contemporary romance author. It made me want to revisit Night Tide and in doing so, revisit my review. So, I did.
Anna Burke's Night Tide is my favorite enemies to lovers book of all time. This is why.
Macon Reviews: Night Tide
I did come here to make friends.
And by here, of course, I mean planet earth. Through a glorious combination of being bullied as a kid, rejection-sensitive dysphoria, religious trauma, and general disposition, I have become a person who, at the core of my being, wants to like and be liked. I also want you to like and be liked. I want this so much I have dedicated my life to ensuring everyone gets to play. I very literally help people make friends for a living. It was no surprise, then, that when I opened Anna Burke’s Night Tide (2021, Bywater Books) and read, “Lillian Lee didn’t believe in love at first sight, but she did believe in the inevitability of hate. She’d felt it, hot and liquid coiling in her stomach the first time she locked eyes with Ivy Holden,” my stomach clenched, twisted tight, lodged in my diaphragm, and did not release for 289 pages.
Lillian Lee never expected Ivy Holden to be a part of her life again. They’d been bitter rivals throughout veterinary school. Their relationship is built of sharp edges, resentment, and enmity, “that kind of fierce awareness of another person that bordered on obsession.” Ivy had always brought out the worst in Lillian. Her anger, her pettiness, her bitter longing for more than she could ever hope to have. Thankfully, they went their separate ways after graduation. Ivy went to Colorado to work with horses, and Lillian took a job close to home to work with her best friend from vet school in Seal Cove, Maine. It was the last place a person like Ivy – entitled, privileged, elite – would ever want to work. Seal Cove was a waypoint to Ivy’s family's summer home. Barely a blip. It was Lillian’s place, though. Lillian was stable there. Lillian was safe there. Lillian had settled in Seal Cove, and the last thing she wanted was for Ivy to invade her settlement.
It wasn’t like ending up in Seal Cove had been Ivy’s plan. She’d thought she’d built her forever life in Colorado, but things happen, our bodies betray us, and plans change. The pain, the diagnosis, and the distance from her family. It was too much. Seal Cove offered a way to salvage something from her wreckage – a chance to keep doing what she loved closer to those who loved her. It gave her hope.
Lillian Lee and their horrible, irresistible chemistry be damned.
Lillian Lee, who has always seen Ivy maybe a bit too clearly. Lillian Lee with her doe eyes, perfect mouth, and insufferable righteousness. Lillian Lee, whom she could never quite shake from the shadows of her mind, no matter how hard she tried. Lillian Lee, who had always felt to Ivy as terrifying and inevitable as the tide.
The tension between Lillian and Ivy is almost a character in this novel. Its puissance, razor-sharp and suffocating, permeates every page. They are magnets, but their polarity is off. They are too different – Ivy, all private schools, summer homes, and the world at her feet; Lillian, all second-hand clothes, hard work, and scrabbling for a place in a world not built for her or her family. It could never work. This thing between them was too big. There is too much bad blood. The closer they get, the harder away they shove until they are both beaten raw by the ebb and flow. “Ivy felt like the water below. Lillian was a cliff she’d been dashing herself against for years, and she’d worn patterns into Lillian just as surely as she had parted and reformed around the narrow bulk of Lillian’s body, sliced by rock and barnacle, but still whole.” There is real pain between them, deep wounds carved by the other’s insecurities and self-preservation instincts. These women have hurt each other. They have been, they are, both carefully and carelessly mean. The kind of mean we can all be when we are scared and running from our fate and ourselves.
Night Tide is paced masterfully. It is constantly pushing and pulling, continually building and breaking. We are the ocean slapping again and again against the cliff. It is a chewy novel, complex and dense, but reads smooth as silk. Part of this is because Night Tide’s world-building is exquisite. Seal Cove feels wholly lived in and populated by interesting and complicated characters. Every place feels filled with story. There is the sense that you could follow any character as they leave a scene and be dropped into the middle of another fantastic story.
The bigger part, though, is Burke is a master of her craft. She clearly understands the chassis of romance and uses this to her advantage. There is an inevitability to the romance novel. We know how this is going to end. The joy, always, is in how we get to the happily ever after. Burke seems to understand that because we know how the story ends, we can handle the darkness and take the world's sharpness.
There is the promise of light, and hope is the thing with feathers, after all.
In Night Tide, Anna Burke writes unflinchingly about pain - the pain we feel, the pain we cause, and the pain we let define us. She does not just investigate the shadows of our pain. She invites you to explore them with her, taking you deep into the places we try not to look, and often read romance to escape. In the hands of a lesser author - a lesser writer, a lesser craftsperson, a lesser heart - this story quickly becomes cruel, ableist, and a propagator of deeply abusive and problematic relationship dynamics. But we are not in the hands of a lesser author. Anna Burke is telling this story. So, what we are given in Night Tide is a beautiful exploration of the pain we cause, the pain we feel, and the vulnerability it takes to forgive and be forgiven.
This book is special. It is the kind of book that expands your empathy if you let it.
Please let it.
Buy Night Tide: Bookshop. Amazon. Apple. Bywater.
Ivy and Lillian Mixtape
1. wish we never happened by BLÜ EYES
There is just something about this song that makes me picture Lillian, windows rolled down a bit, singing along, telling herself she isn't thinking about Ivy, telling herself she doesn't think about Ivy while she scream-sings this song in the way that only those who relate a little too hard can.
2. Northern Attitude by Noah Kahan
Ivy was raised out in the cold.
3. Cold Love by Rainbow Kitten Surprise
“Not whole, not holy, separate but syncopated… it’s second nature to love you; it’s first to die.”
4. Motion Sickness by Phoebe Bridgers
There truly is something so jarring in how these women fight, tooth and nail, not to show an ounce of vulnerability—spinning one other up and down when all they needed to do, always, was surrender.
5. Skinny Love by Bon Iver
The way these women hurt each other.
6. Snow on the Beach by Taylor Swift (ft. Lana Del Rey)
The first time I heard this song, all I could think about was Lillian and Ivy. They really are “weird but fucking beautiful.”
7. Holy by King Princess
The power play between Lillian and Ivy in this book is scorching. There is something in this song that feels like them—an intense power battle, but – at the core – an almost unspeakable tenderness.
8. Warm with You by Hayden Calnin
There are moments in this book where it feels like all Ivy has ever wanted is to be warm, and the only place she has ever felt warm is wrapped up in Lillian.
9. Side Effects by JOSEPH
Sometimes, it is the side effects that get you, and it's all about choosing the side effects you want for the rest of your life.
10. If the World Was Ending by JP Saxe (ft. Julia Michaels)
There is such an inevitability to Ivy and Lillian. In the end, it will be the two of them slow dancing as the world crumbles.
11. this is how you fall in love by Jeremy Zucker & Chelsea Cutler
This song feels like the tentative peace Ivy and Lillian reach at the novel's end. The graceful understanding that there is still pain to heal and trust to grow, but no one is going anywhere. The only way forward is falling together.
12. Bloom by LULLANAS
The thing about trillium is that it is a slow-blooming flower. It needs months of germination. It is very susceptible to overcrowding. It takes forever to see any leaves, and often you won’t even get flowers in the first year. However, when it finally takes, it lasts for decades and grows wild and dense, filling all its spaces with color and life.