Okay, so I don’t normally do book blast type things but I have two in a row this week! I just couldn’t pass them up since they were for authors I adore. I swear, I wont’ do this a ton!
Alyxandra Harvey, popular young adult author of the Drake Chronicles, Haunting Violet, and Stolen Away, is back with a bewitching new young adult fantasy series that will take readers through the streets of magical 19th century London. A BREATH OF FROST, the first installment in The Lovegrove Legacy (published by Bloomsbury Childrens) goes on sale January 7, 2014. It’s full of witches, magic, family secrets, goblin markets, deer-people, and boys in cravats!
A note from Alyxandra Harvey…
Like most writers, I keep notebooks full of details and ideas and character profiles for my novel in progress. I got to know Emma first and A Breath of Frost became her story.
Meet Emma:
Age: 17
Hair: Reddish brown
Eyes: Green
Hobbies: Stargazing
Familiar: Deer
Magic: Weather, especially lightning/ rainstorms
Personality traits: Practical, witty, honest, quiet
Wants: to find out what happened to her mother
Wants not to want: Cormac
Wants anyway: Cormac
I also often use collages to get to know my characters betters. It is so much more personal and opens me up to really hearing what makes her unique. In the movie in my head I cast Rachel Hurd-Wood.
Emma is a seventeen year old girl in 1814 who discovers she is a witch. She has to learn all of the social graces and the long complicated rules of etiquette in regular London society…as well as how not to make it accidentally rain inside the ballroom.
Emma is practical and quiet but she is no pushover! She refuses to let herself be cowed, even when she is being hounded and carted away by the Order of the Iron Nail. Even when the one doing the carting is Cormac Fairfax, who is just as unfairly handsome and maddening as he was a few months ago when they kissed in a snowy garden.
Emma hasn’t forgotten.
How do you forget a dark-eyed young man with a wicked grin and dangerous charm? Especially when he seems to know more about Emma’s family and her mother’s madness then she herself has ever been able to find out.
Sometimes she thinks he remembers the kiss too. And sometimes she just wants to punch him in the nose. He clearly has secrets of his own to keep and Emma doesn’t know whether or not she can trust him.
She only knows that she can’t stop thinking about him.
And with the warlock Greymalkin Sisters killing debutantes, Emma isn’t sure she has time left to figure him out.
She has to save herself and her cousins first.
~
I hope you’ll enjoy getting to know Emma as much as I did!
In 1814, three cousins—Gretchen, Emma, and Penelope—discover their unknown family lineage of witchcraft when their individual magical powers unexpectedly begin to manifest. Now, beyond the familiar manicured gardens and ballrooms of Regency London, a dangerous, alluring underworld available only to those with power is now open to the
cousins.
But by claiming their power, the three cousins have accidentally opened the gates to the Underworld. Now ghouls, hellhounds—and most terrifying of all, the spirits of dark witches known as the Greymalkin Sisters—are hunting and killing young witches for their powers. And, somehow, Emma is connected to the murders … because she keeps finding the bodies. Can the cousins seal the gates before another witch is killed …or even worse, before their gifts are stripped away?
“Harvey balances a large cast with an intricate plot with flair….A successful blend of Regency and paranormal romance.” ~ Kirkus Reviews
“Filling her latest with a large cast of characters— from the society elite to the magical world’s dark underbelly—Harvey keeps up the action and clever dialogue as the protagonist, Emma, deals with high-class mean girls, familial secrets, and a confusing crush. A smashing blend of adventure, fantasy, humor, romance, and historical fiction.” ~ Booklist
About the author:
Alyxandra Harvey lives in a stone Victorian house in Ontario, Canada with a few resident ghosts who are allowed to stay as long as they keep company manners. She loves medieval dresses, used to be able to recite all of The Lady of Shalott by Tennyson, and has been accused, more than once, of being born in the wrong century. She believes this to be mostly true except for the fact that she really likes running water, women’s rights, and ice cream.
Among her favourite books are ‘The Wood Wife’ by Terri Windling, ‘Jane Eyre’ by Charlotte Bronte, and of course, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen. Elizabeth Bennet is her hero because she’s smart and sassy, and Mr. Darcy is, well, yum.
Aside from the ghosts, she also lives with husband and their dogs. She likes cinnamon lattes, tattoos and books.
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