Spotlight & Giveaway: A Circle of Uncommon Witches by Paige Crutcher

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Paige Crutcher to HJ!

Hi Paige and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, A Circle of Uncommon Witches: A Novel!

 
Hi! Thank you so much for having me.
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

It’s the story of a woman whose family is cursed to never find true love, and how she enlists the help of the man who set the curse to break it. It’s about fighting for what you dream of, in all the ways necessary, and how true love can show up in many forms.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

One of my favorites is: “The truth is the spell, the spell is the truth.” I think that is true not only in Doreen’s world where powerful magic exists, but in this one where words are a certain type of magic. Our words can weave spells over people, they can uplift them or they can break them.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

The working title was A Brief History of Uncommon Witches, and I listened to a lot of instrumental music, various Irish and Scottish artists, and a bit of The Lord of Rings soundtrack (which is just a delight!). Research is a continuous adventure for me. I have a small library on folklore, mythology, history, witchcraft, the cycles of history, the cycles of the tides and the moon, and the list goes on and on. I love to listen to podcasts on the history of witches, witchcraft, folklore, and sisterhood (which I firmly believe is a big ingredient in a specific form of power). It’s one of my favorite things to get recommendations on articles, biographies, books, and podcasts on witchcraft, witches, mythology, or anything in that vein.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

I think they have a knowing of each other on a soul level, and that also shows up in a physical reaction. I am a sucker for an instant connection, whether by hormones or something deeper, and for them it’s a bit of both.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

I love the scenes with Ada, but it’s more because she really freaked me out and I didn’t know where she came from. This soul-sucking Queen of the Dead who created her own rulebook and had zero qualms of going off book when it suited her.

“The Queen of the Order of the Dead did not move like any other creature on the earth. She was made of bones, but they were not only hers. She was constructed of ashes and tears and the bits of soul she borrowed . . . or stole. She could appear the size of a giant one day, or the size of a child the next. Her arms might reach the floor, or she might have one leg twice the size of the other. Regardless, she moved with elegance, as though her mind was reminding the rest of her body to pretend to be water. To flow with an ease the bones should not allow.”

Readers should read this book….

If they love bold witches and magic, and are seeking fantasy with a dash of romance, a heavy dose of adventure, and a powerful sisterhood.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I am working on something new that’s a bit of a pivot, but still in the vein of witches and family, and (delicious, terrible, fierce) power.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: One print copy giveaway of A CIRCLE OF UNCOMMON WITCHES, US Winner Only

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: Is there anything you wouldn’t do for true love?

 
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Excerpt from A Circle of Uncommon Witches: A Novel:

From A Circle of Uncommon Witches by Paige Crutcher. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

ONE
For more years than she knew what to do with, Doreen MacKinnon had been waiting for the day she would turn thirty and find true love or die.
It was the curse of being a MacKinnon; the thirteenth generation of Scottish witches who had been cursed by a rival line, the MacDonalds, back during the times of King James VI. Each line blamed the other for alerting the blustering king to their existence, and the witch hunt and trials that followed.
“If Ambrose MacDonald hadn’t bewitched Lenora, none of this would have happened,” Doreen’s aunt Stella always said, usually when Doreen was up to her armpits in research, working on her own to break the curse. “You’ll never get anywhere with it, girl, but then again, neither will he,” she’d cackle, before returning to pruning the dark violet roses that ran along her drive while Doreen sat on a threadbare blanket in the shade surrounded by books, wondering how anyone could be so happy to have imprisoned another witch.
“Why did he bewitch her?” Doreen asked.
“Oh, he did not,” her aunt Kayleen had said during a visit when Doreen and Margot were eight and nine years old. “Stella, you know it wasn’t that simple. Ambrose fell in love with Lenora, and Lenora with Ambrose.”
“She had a bad picker,” Stella argued.
“Still, she chose him, and then she left him. All he knew was how she had been spirited away by her family in the night, taken and then gone. Deader than an exorcised spirit,” Kayleen said, while measuring out sugar and fermented grapes and hibiscus before pouring all three into her cauldron—a mixer she had purchased from a new store in town.
“You can’t have a modicum of sympathy for that man,” Stella warned, adding a pinch of lavender to the mix. “He took his broken heart and devastated our family line, cursed us to the bone.”
“Broken hearts break hearts,” Kayleen said.
“And now we break him over and over again,” Stella said, before finally shooing the girls out of the room.
“All these years later, and I still don’t get it,” Doreen said to her cousin, Margot, some twenty years later. They were sitting in their family’s herbal apothecary shop in the small town of Pines, waiting for customers or time to hurry up and pass them by. “Why won’t anyone tell us where Ambrose is?”
Margot shot her a look. “He’s in the Dead House.”
“Which is a myth.”
Margot snorted. “Yeah, and so’s the curse.”
Doreen blew her too-long bangs away from her face. “The curse can be broken. And you know it.”
Margot shook her head.
“You do, and yet you’re really going to marry Dean Whitmeyer?”
Margot sighed, not bothering to look up from the soul cards she was sorting. “I love him.”
“But you don’t know if he loves you.”
Margot didn’t reply. She wasn’t about to lie to her best friend and cousin, and she couldn’t rebuke the truth. What Margot had chosen instead was to accept that she was marrying a man under her spell. Or enthralled, as Stella put it, but a thrall always made Doreen think of a B movie with a vampire rising from the grave, his black hair slicked back, eyes bulging as he sank his fangs into the neck of the first unsuspecting blonde who came his way. “I vant to suck your blood.”
Though what Margot was doing felt almost as bad. “I vant to steal your love.”
Doreen pulled out her final resource from beneath the table. It was a notebook adorned with a unicorn flying across a rainbow on the front, the cover bent and worn from age and love, and a last-ditch effort to convince Margot to make a different choice. She turned to a dog-eared page, and slid it under her cousin’s nose, over the cards.
“I know what it says,” Margot said, shaking her head at Doreen. “I wrote it.”
“Are you sure?”
When Margot made no move to glance at it, Doreen took it back and began to read out loud instead.
“‘I, Margot Rose Early, being of brilliant mind and even better body, do hereby promise to never give up on myself or true love. Unlike the aunts and mothers before us, I refuse to believe this hogwash of a curse. This jinx of a whammy will not take my sanity or my life or my heart. I am the goddess of my destiny and may no curse mess with me.’”
“We were kids, Doreen.”
Doreen huffed an exasperated breath. She leaned over and grabbed Margot’s arm, forcing her cousin to look at her. But she dropped it when she saw the tears in her eyes.
Margot was strong, fierce, and determined, and Doreen was always convinced it would be her who would smite the curse and restore the balance, once and for all. When they were small, Doreen and Margot had created a spell that enabled them to get into the magically locked attic of their home and steal Stella’s books on their history and craft. It was a spell they would use many times while researching how to break the curse and grow their powers. Doreen, the mimic, was able to duplicate any spell, and Margot, the creator, capable of crafting any charm from thought.
Doreen had never considered Margot would give up.
“Oh, Margot.”
Margot sniffed and turned back to the cards. “I don’t want to die, Doreen. This is my best option, and I do love him. I can be enough for us both. You’ll see.”
“You’re wrong, and what we’re forced to do is wrong,” Doreen said.
“We have a choice,” Margot said. “That’s more than most get about their fate. Maybe we should try to be happy instead of wasting our time dreaming we can change it.”
Doreen remembered vividly the day she had learned the truth. She was seven and had developed her first crush on a boy named Lucas in her first-grade class. Doreen always thought he was so mysterious, mainly because he ignored her no matter how often she studied him. But one day, during a field trip, they’d ridden the bus to the science museum in the next town over and gone over a bump. He’d looked back at her, grinning his gap-tooth grin. In that moment, it hit her—a bolt of lightning to the soft spot under her belly. She wanted to jump up, climb over the seats in the bus, and brush her fingertips against the curve of his smile.

From A Circle of Uncommon Witches by Paige Crutcher. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

A witch generationally cursed to never find true love sets out to break the spell cast on her family, and must team up with the last person who wants to help her – the witch who set the curse in the first place.

Doreen MacKinnon is doomed to die of a broken heart – if she can’t break the centuries old curse placed on her family.

Three hundred years ago, Ambrose MacDonald, a powerful male witch, fell in love with a MacKinnon. And when the MacKinnon witches forbade him from seeing his love, by secretly hiding her away, he retaliated by cursing the family and its future generations to never find love. But it wasn’t without a cost. Now, Ambrose is imprisoned by those same witches, trapped in a tempest and doomed to outlive everyone he has ever loved.

But Doreen isn’t like the other MacKinnon witches. As the 13th generation of the MacKinnon line, Doreen is one of the most powerful witches in centuries… and one of the loneliest. So when she discovers where Ambrose has been trapped, she releases him to help her break the curse, once and for all. Ambrose agrees to help, but with his own motive: vengeance. He plans to use her as bait to enact his revenge on her family.

Together, they enter a series of trials, which take them to a castle in Scotland, off a cliff, and into a world beyond their wildest dreams. As they work together, sparks start to fly, but soon Doreen must choose how far she is willing to go to break the curse, and what she’s willing to sacrifice.

Paige Crutcher’s A Circle of Uncommon Witches is a story of adventure, romance, and destiny, that asks: is true love worth the cost?
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Meet the Author:

PAIGE CRUTCHER is the author of The Orphan Witch and The Lost Witch. She is a former journalist, and her work appears in multiple anthologies and online publications. She is an artist and yogi, and when not writing, she prefers to spend her time trekking through the forest with her children, hunting for portals to new worlds.
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