Spotlight & Giveaway: A CURSE FOR THE HOMESICK by Laura Robson

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Laura Robson to HJ!

Hi Laura and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, A CURSE FOR THE HOMESICK!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

There is a lonely island north of everything where, occasionally, three women will be cursed to turn anyone they look at to stone. When Tess is twelve, her mother, without realizing she’s been cursed, kills Soren’s parents. Tess has always wanted to leave the island; Soren has always wanted to stay. This is the story of how they fall in love.
 

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

I would not last here. I never did. The feeling would pass. It always had, hadn’t it? It would be ridiculous to imagine such a thing—that I had been in love with Soren more or less without pause for the entirety of my adult life.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• This is my third published novel but fifteenth completed manuscript.
• It was originally written entirely in UK English (with apologies to my editors). Favorite, football, towards.
• In very early drafts, I was wary of anyone drawing too many parallels between myself and the characters, so I invented distinctions. Eventually, I decided it was more compelling if I just wrote the things I knew, which is why Tess is a swimmer who ends up in the Bay Area instead of a track star who ends up in Seattle.

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

Tess dates a number of people throughout the course of this book, and with each of them, she feels like she’s becoming different versions of herself. When she’s with Soren, though, she feels like she’s her favorite version of herself—or maybe a version who is not a character at all. Soren is attracted to Tess for the same reason—because she feels like home. For as long as either can remember, they have both felt familiar to each other.

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

My favorite scene comes toward the end and involves Soren reading a book. Spoilers!
I’ll withhold that and instead share a text conversation between Tess and Soren that I have enjoyed sharing with my own loved ones as they prepare to read this book. It made me laugh, but I fear I am always making myself laugh. Alas!

The next day, Soren didn’t come to dinner. I didn’t see him at all. But he left another box of books on our doorstep. Hamlet, The Exeter Book Riddles, and then, slimmer than the others, a bound copy of his master’s thesis. I texted him a photo of it.
Me: We don’t talk enough about this pretentious streak of yours
Soren: You don’t have to read it
Me: As if I would miss the chance to find a typo in your work
Soren: I hope you know that if you find a typo, I will die
Me: I love a challenge

Readers should read this book….

They like romantic stories that aren’t necessarily romance. They like fantastical stories that aren’t necessarily fantasy. They can’t decide if they love the place they grew up or hate it. They like islands. They like swimming. They like dead languages. They have a friend, or would like to have a friend, who they always feel next to them—even on the other side of the world.

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

I have another book coming out next year! It’s about dating apps and quantifying love and creating things. I would say it’s weird and funny, but as previously noted—no one laughs at my jokes quite as much as I do.
 
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: 2 Print copies of A CURSE FOR THE HOMESICK by Laura Robson to U.S. winners!

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: The magic in A Curse for the Homesick is a literal interpretation of a feeling I had growing up—which was that I was uneasy with the roles and expectations I felt were foisted upon women. So my question for readers is: What sort of fantastical curse or blessing would you use to describe your own experience growing up?

 
a Rafflecopter giveaway

 
 

Excerpt from A Curse for the Homesick:

I returned to Stenland the day I turned twenty-six. I didn’t mean to get in on my birthday. Originally I’d planned to get in the day before, but there was too much wind to land at the airport, so I ended up taking the overnight ferry from Aberdeen. I woke alone in the small, rocking bedroom and could not move the air from my throat into my lungs.
I got dressed and went outside. From a kilometre out, I saw the hazy shape of the island. The black sand; the turf-roofed houses; the craggy mountains. The only other passenger on the ferry was a twenty-something backpacker who was throwing up over the railing. The captain watched me, like he wanted me to be ill too, like this would be proof I’d been made soft in my absence. He didn’t greet me by name, but I knew he knew me. Everyone knew everyone in Stenland.
I wasn’t going to come, but it was all Linnea asked for. I tried to buy her things instead: a vacation, a dress, a collection of ceramic dishes. No, she said, no to all of it. The only thing she’d asked was that Kitty and I come home to be her bridesmaids.
When I climbed down the ramp to the concrete dock, I could see a banner hanging from Hedda’s. Congratulations, Henrik and Linnea! Behind it, in the basin of fog, the old brutalist church was a solemn slab of gray. Red woolen clothes flapped on the bodies of stone statues.
I could not bring myself to look directly at them.
I opened the door to Hedda’s with my boot, and a bell jingled. From behind the register, the painting of the Virgin Mary looked scandalized. As always, it smelled like fermented fish.
Had I missed it?
No.
I had not let myself.
I could hear Hedda rummaging around in the back room, and no one else seemed to be there, so I shoved my hands into my pockets and examined the counter. Hedda had finally bought a credit-card reader. So that was nice. According to the menu, this was the island’s best capachino. I imagined tourists seeing that and tittering—those poor stupid Stenns who couldn’t even spell the food they served. I felt embarrassed, then resentful.
Hedda emerged from the back room with her hands on her aproned hips. She looked older.
I lifted my shoulder to keep the strap of my duffel bag in place.
“You may as well sit down,” Hedda said and set to work crabbily pouring me a cup of coffee.
I sat. The chair squeaked.
Hedda added a liberal amount of cream and sugar to my mug before handing it over. “You look like a corpse microwaved back to life,” she said.
I took a sip of the coffee. Hedda nodded, satisfied, then went back behind the counter to retrieve a small pie, which she dropped unceremoniously onto the table next to the coffee. The pie smelled like mutton and kohlrabi. I didn’t pick up the fork.
“Glad to see you’re still the conversational equivalent of a dead seagull,” Hedda said.
“Thanks for the coffee,” I said.
She exhaled, exasperated.
The door opened, and in like a gust of wind burst Kitty. She was wearing over-the-knee suede boots and a long woolen coat. Her lipstick was bright purple. When she saw me, she barreled through the café, knocked aside a chair, and bodily forced me onto my feet so we could hug.
Hedda grumbled something about the two of us acting like we never saw each other. Stenns had no sense of scale. There was only the island and everywhere else. Since Kitty and I both lived “everywhere else,” of course Hedda would assume we spent all our time together, though I hadn’t seen Kitty since Christmas. Whenever we met, it felt like the world’s smallest survivor’s group.
“You’re early!” Kitty said. “We agreed on nine, right? Okay, whatever. I’ve been at Linnea’s just now, and she was trying on her dress again, and, I don’t know, her mum thought it looked too tight on her, so that was a whole thing, and then Henrik showed up to do whatever it is Henrik does, so Linnie had to change out of her dress so she could—”
Over Kitty’s shoulder, Hedda pinched her middle and ring fingers together with her thumb, making a yap yap yap sign.
“—which made me think, sure, if I’m going into town to meet Tess anyway, I might as well offer to drop the dress at the tailor’s, so.” Kitty flourished a hand. “Here I am.”
“Hey,” I said.
She took a sip of my coffee, made a face, and hugged me again.
Hedda wouldn’t let me escape the shop without the pie and a loaf of hard, dark bread in my hands. Once the door jingled shut behind us, I said, “I have a bad feeling.”
“Well, obviously. You let Hedda put what I can only assume was six tablespoons of sugar in your coffee.”
“A bad skeld feeling,” I said.
“We’re only here for three days,” Kitty said. “Don’t be paranoid. I’m manifesting a very short and easy trip for us. Don’t out-manifest me with something awful.”
She looped her arm through mine as we walked. The September weather was colder than a California January. We zigzagged down the street between the stone fences, and I remembered how I used to love the way the air tasted on days like this—earthy and salty and sweet.
We reached the little red house by the cemetery. Linnea had added beds of wispy white flowers and a porch swing out front. In the windows, I saw lacy curtains like the ones Linnea used to have in her bedroom growing up. Back in California, I had a Polaroid of Linnea climbing out her window through those curtains; on the bottom, Kitty had sharpied Faerie Queen emerging from flower.
We stared at the door. Eventually I said, “How’s Georgia?”
“We’re off again,” Kitty said.
“I’m sorry.”
She lifted a shoulder. “How’s Noah?”
“He’s good.”
“He didn’t want to come?”
“I didn’t think he should.”
From inside, I could hear a familiar fluty voice. Linnea was singing. Her voice was a time capsule, airy as the wind and pretty as anything. For a minute, I felt like we were all eighteen, my hair smelling of chlorine and Kitty with her books in a too small but very fashionable handbag and Linnea carrying a bottle of elderflower liqueur that we were going to drink down by the beach.
“How has it been?” I asked.
“Being here? Not, you know, super fun. On the list of things I would like to be doing with my time, this ranks somewhere near drinking rat poison.”
“But you’re not still in love with her,” I said.
“If only we could all forget how it felt to be in love the first time,” Kitty said.
“I never think about him.”
Kitty said “Sure” and opened the door.
I stepped inside after her and saw Linnea in profile. She was standing in front of the sink, looking at her reflection in the mirror as she applied mascara. Oh—no. Not Linnea. Saffi, her sister. Her blond hair was in two long braids on either side of her round face and elegant neck. When she heard the door, she turned and gave us a smile with a tiny gap between the front teeth. She looked like one of the dolls they sold in the gift shops in town—the perfect Stennish woman.
Saffi broke the spell by setting down her mascara and hugging Kitty and me in turn. I got the feeling she was only hugging Kitty—whom she’d surely already seen—because it was awkward to hug me. I stared at Saffi’s neck. She smelled like Linnea, like jasmine.
“You look gorgeous,” Saffi said generously. I knew what I looked like. Hedda had told me: a microwaved corpse. “I love your hair.”
I looked down at my hair. The ends were blunt and frazzled from chlorine. Kitty laughed.
“Yours too,” I said.
Apropos of nothing, Kitty said, “Tess, where did you getyour ridiculous engineer money?”
She was trying to make Saffi feel bad. It was a very Kitty thing to do—to make someone else feel worse in the hopes of making me feel better. I wished she wouldn’t.
“Noah got them for me, actually,” I said.
“Oh!” Kitty said. “So that’s how he spends his ridiculous programmer money?”
An awkward silence.
“Linnie’s so excited to have you here,” Saffi said finally. “She’s out back.”
We followed her through the house, and Kitty poked my spine. She mouthed something incomprehensible, and when I shook my head, she rolled her eyes and texted me.
Kitty: I’m being helpful!!!
Me: Please don’t be that helpful

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

On Stenland, there comes a time known as skeld season: one day, any woman on the island can wake with three black lines on her forehead, the mark of a skeld. Skeld season comes around without warning, and while each window of time lasts only three months, anyone a skeld turns to stone is very much dead.

That’s how Tess’s mother killed Soren’s parents. Maybe for this reason alone, Tess and Soren should not have fallen in love. Since the time her mother was a skeld, Tess has wanted to leave Stenland, to run from the windswept island, from her family and friends. She is unwilling to bear the responsibility of one day killing anyone, let alone someone she loves. Soren has been determined to stay, to live out his life in the place he knows as home, even if that life could be cut short during the latest skeld season. They cannot see eye to eye—and yet they cannot stay apart. She tries to come back for him. He tries to leave for her. But can your love for one person outweigh everything else combined? And how do you decide how much you’re willing to risk, if it might mean destroying someone else in the process?
Book Links: Amazon | B&N |
 
 

Meet the Author:

Laura Brooke Robson is the author of GIRLS AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD and THE SEA KNOWS MY NAME. She grew up in the mountains of Oregon and studied creative writing at Stanford; now, she spends her time running, swimming, and drinking more coffee than is strictly necessary. She does not like writing third-person bios, but she’d do anything for you.
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