Inspiration for The Looking Glass Series by Jessica Arnold + Giveaway

Welcome to Jessica Arnold, author of The Lingering Grace, with a guest post about how fairy tales and magic influenced her series.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with fairytales. One of my favorite books was Spindle’s End by Robin McKinley. I wanted to live in that world. In that story, magic is just like any other natural force: it can be learned, it can be manipulated, it can get out of hand. Sometimes it can simply be neutral. When I was writing The Lingering Grace and The Looking Glass, this was the type of magic that inspired me the most.

Unlike the fairytale kingdom of Spindle’s End, the world of The Lingering Grace is set firmly in modern times. Alice is a normal sixteen-year-old who goes to public school and has typical teenage problems. She doesn’t encounter magic until, in The Looking Glass, she has to break a century-old curse. In The Lingering Grace, she takes the magic one step further and begins to create spells of her own.

As in Spindle’s End, the magic Alice deals with is very much a natural force—not necessarily good or bad. And like any other force, rules apply. Magic comes at a price. All the spells that Alice works draw power from some other source. And sometimes that source isn’t what she expects it to be.

Writing these spells was one of my favorite parts of working on the book, partly because it brought me right back to my fairy-tale phase—partly because I never actually grew out of my fairy-tale phase. Even though the world is modern, I hope that The Lingering Grace gives readers the feeling of magical possibilities that the world of fairy tales always created for me.

The Lingering Grace
The Looking Glass #2

Jessica Arnold

YA Fantasy/Fairy Tale
Month9Books
March 15, 2016

Google Play | Chapters |Amazon | B&N | Kobo | TBD | iBooks

All magic comes with a price.

The new school year brings with it a welcome return to normalcy after Alice’s narrow escape from a cursed hotel while on summer vacation. But when a young girl drowns in a freak accident that seems eerily similar to her own near-death experience, Alice suspects there might be something going on that not even the police can uncover.

The girl’s older sister, Eva attends Alice’s school, and Alice immediately befriends her. But things change when when Alice learns that Eva is determined to use magic to bring her sister back. She must decide whether to help Eva work the highly dangerous magic or stop her at all costs. After all, no one knows better than Alice the true price of magic.

The Looking Glass

Google Play | BAM | Chapters | Indies | Amazon | B&N | Kobo | TBD | iBooks

Find the diary, break the curse, step through The Looking Glass!

Fifteen-year-old Alice Montgomery wakes up in the lobby of the B&B where she has been vacationing with her family to a startling discovery: no one can see or hear her. The cheap desk lights have been replaced with gas lamps and the linoleum floor with hardwood and rich Oriental carpeting. Someone has replaced the artwork with eerie paintings of Elizabeth Blackwell, the insane actress and rumored witch who killed herself at the hotel in the 1880s. Alice watches from behind the looking glass where she is haunted by Elizabeth Blackwell. Trapped in the 19th-century version of the hotel, Alice must figure out a way to break Elizabeth’s curse—with the help of Elizabeth's old diary and Tony, the son of a ghost hunter who is investigating the haunted B&B—before she becomes the inn's next victim.

About the Author

Jessica Arnold lives (in an apartment) and works (in a cubicle) in Boston, Massachusetts. She has a master‘s degree in publishing and writing from Emerson College. 

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