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
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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