Spotlight & Giveaway: Back in a Spell by Lana Harper

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Lana Harper to HJ!

Hi Lana and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Back in a Spell!

I’m Lana Harper, author of the Witches of Thistle Grove series – I’m so excited to be here to chat about witchy (and seasonal) rom coms!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

Back in a Spell is an awkward-first-date-to-lovers romance between Nina Blackmoore, one of the most powerful witches in Thistle Grove (and an uptight, mundane lawyer by day) and Mortimer Gutierrez, the offbeat, spontaneous owner of the Shamrock Cauldron, the town’s quirkiest bar. While Nina and Morty start off on the worst possible foot, they soon find themselves accidentally soul-bound to each other—leading to some epically steamy scenes—even as Nina’s power mysteriously spikes and Morty begins developing unexpected magic of his own. Spell is also a wintry Yule love story and an LGBTQ romance, as both Nina and Morty are pansexual and Morty identifies as nonbinary.
 

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

“This time of year, the lake somehow looked even more elemental. Like some primordial origin story, the place where winter’s cold heart had been born back when everything began.”

“‘The magical version of getting blackout drunk and eloping in Vegas, basically,’ he quipped, twisting the cleaning cloth in his hands, winding it around his knuckles like a boxer. ‘So how do we… I don’t know, get a witch divorce? A witch annulment?’”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• There is a lot of snow in this book, and fortunately for me, it happened to be snowing quite a bit while I was working on my first draft. So, in my Google doc outline, I had an entire section dedicated to describing the visuals and textures of different types of snow so I could keep the winter aesthetic fresh.
• Much of every TWOG story is based on my own wish fulfillment, and in Spell, we finally get to spend time at Castle Camelot, my not-so-secret favorite place in Thistle Grove and the town’s answer to Medieval Times and renaissance faires—two of my favorite kinds of real-life immersive entertainment. I love how unabashedly cheesy and campy both can be, but they also mean so much to so many fans and cosplayers, in an earnest way that I deeply relate to. Nina’s experience of an entire childhood spent running around Castle Camelot’s halls—as a reprieve from her cold, difficult family, as well as a home away from home—is also something that resonates with me. I wish I’d had that kind of playground growing up!

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

Nina was ditched at the altar by her fiancée a year ago, and has been stagnating ever since; lonely and adrift, unsure of what comes next. She only agrees to a dating-app date with Morty at her best friend’s urging to try something drastically different, as a last-ditch effort to break her out of the lingering stupor. Nina prefers her life immaculate and predictable—and a devilishly sexy, burlesque-loving, aerial-arts-performing bartender is exactly the kind of chaotic person she’d never choose for herself… which makes Morty perfect for this experiment. Though she’s immediately physically attracted to Morty—his username is @lowkeyloki, and those trickster god vibes are potent—it turns out that stark personality differences aside, the Blackmoores have been trying to buy Morty’s bar out from under his family. Cue both simmering tension and inevitable sparks.

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

Because of the feedback loop created by Nina and Morty’s accidental witch bond, I got to write their sex scenes from both their perspectives at the same time, as Nina would have been experiencing them. The, ahem, intimacy of this experience was unlike anything I’d ever written before, and it honestly made me jealous that this kind of connection doesn’t exist in our world!

Readers should read this book….

If they enjoy intensely magical towns, mysterious lakes, witchy families, cozy winter settings, mismatched lovers (who eventually turn out to be a perfect fit), and very spicy scenes, possibly on bar tops.

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

Back in a Spell releases on January 3, 2023, and I’m currently working on the next book in the Witches of Thistle Grove series—In Charm’s Way, which will be Delilah Harlow’s story!
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: One print copy of BACK IN A SPELL for a U.S. only winner.

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: Thistle Grove is populated both by normies (mundane humans without magic) and four witch families—the Harlows (recordkeepers and librarians, with a deep, arcane connection to the town’s magic and its mountaintop lake; the Blackmoores (elementalists and illusionists, the strongest of the families); the Avramovs (necromancers and speakers to the dead, the most chaotic and morally ambiguous clan); and the Thorns (green magic practitioners and healers).
If you were a normie suddenly made aware of the existence of four powerful witch families running amuck in your hometown, how would you feel about it? And if you were born into one of the families, which would it be?

 
a Rafflecopter giveaway

 
 

Excerpt from Back in a Spell:

Chapter One

Let It Snow

I’ve never been what one might call a winter person.

Witches are supposed to feel naturally aligned with the Wheel of the Year, receptive to the charms of every season-and nowhere is that easier than in Thistle Grove, where every type of weather is utterly and gorgeously flamboyant, the most extravagant cosplay version of what it might look like anywhere else. In theory, I could appreciate the extremeness of its contrasts; all that diamond-faceted white, blazing against the blue of windswept skies and the stark black silhouette of Hallows Hill. I could even get behind winter chic, when it came to sleek après-ski wear. And then there was Yule, with its fragrant wreaths and crackling logs and sea of candlelight. Arguably the most luminous and magical of the solstices.

But in practice? Winter is horribly inelegant and messy, almost impossible to calibrate. One too many layers leaves you sticky and sweltering, while one too few lets the chill creep into your bones. Your hair turns into kindling, or poufs into a staticky halo immune even to glamour spells. You can’t even run properly in winter, unless you’re a die-hard marathoner with no self-preservation instincts left intact.

All around cruel and unusual. At least we rarely suffered more than two months or so of such yearly punishment in Thistle Grove.

But this year, strangely, winter seemed to suit me. This year, I found every fresh snowfall soothing, almost meditative. There was one raging right now beyond the frost-rimed window of the Silver Cherry, where I was grin-and-bearing my way through a jewelry-making class; a feathery whirlwind, like being inside a shaken snow globe filled with drifting down. It felt hypnotic, a chaotic escapade of white that made it hard to hold on to any single thought for long. Which, these days, was more than fine by me.

These days, my thoughts and I didn’t tend to be on the best of terms.

“Sweetheart,” Jessa said, in that delicate tone she’d taken to using on me, like one harsh note might topple me over, damage me in some irreparable way. She didn’t have to be quite that careful with me, but I loved that she wanted to be. “You’re doing your depressed mime face again.”

The words themselves didn’t tend to match up with the spun-sugar tone all that often, because she was still Jessa, and I loved her for that, too.

“What?” I mumbled, finally tearing my eyes from the window. “My . . . what?”

“You know.” She rearranged her adorable, ringlet-framed features into a truly dismal expression, drooping puppy-dog eyes and a dramatically downturned mouth like a melancholy bass. “Like you’re about to perish of chronic woe. Or possibly planning to re-create that scene from The Giver where the kid and his little brother escape into the snow to die with their emotions.”

“It’s been a while since middle school English class, but even so, I’m fairly sure that wasn’t supposed to be the takeaway,” I told her with a snort. “And hard pass on that cold demise. If I absolutely have to die somewhere with my emotions, I’d rather go all nice and toasty.”

Dragging my attention back to my little work tray, strewn with a glittery mishmash of wire and beads, I saw that I’d been halfheartedly tooling around with making earrings before the blizzard got the best of me. Once upon a time, I’d have crafted something gorgeous given an opportunity like this, painstakingly applied myself until I had it just right. Too bad “once upon a time” felt like several eons and an infinity of wrong turns ago.

“Burn you at stake, then, noted,” Jessa quipped-though of course, thoroughly normie as she was, my best friend had no idea how close to home that hit. As far as I knew, Jessa had never once seriously considered the notion that our charming postcard of a town really was settled by witches, exactly like Thistle Grove legend would have you believe.

To her, I was just Nina. Best friend and partner in crime from our shared law school days, now in-house counsel to my family’s extensive business interests. Not Nineve Cliodhna of House Blackmoore, second in line to the most powerful witch dynasty in Thistle Grove.

“Don’t worry, buddy,” I assured her. “I do still have considerable will to live. Just not, like, enough zest to care about these earrings, apparently.”

Jessa pooched out her lower lip, abandoning the complicated (and suspiciously BDSM-looking) beaded choker she’d been working on.

“But that’s the point,” she insisted, smooth brow wrinkling with concern. “That’s what these classes are for, Nina. We’re supposed to be nurturing our creative selves, meeting new people, rediscovering your zest. Unearthing it.”

She looked so crestfallen that for the barest moment, I entertained the idea of assembling the pitiful bead hodgepodge into something pretty with a simple transmutation spell of the pumpkin-into-carriage variety, but even more basic. The raw materials were already right in front of me, half-threaded. I could have done it with just a few words, using a single, purely distilled thought as a vehicle of my will.

But that wouldn’t have been honest or fair, which was part of the reason I never did magic in front of my best friend. For the safety and the continuing preservation of our town, as per the Grimoire-the spellbook that also held sway over the conduct and governance of Thistle Grove’s witch community-only long-term, witchbound partners were permitted access to that secret. And for all that I adored Jessa to pieces, our friendship wasn’t the kind of love the founders had had in mind when deciding who should be privy to our magic.

Letting the oblivion glamour that was cast over the town take hold of her, erasing her memory of whatever spell I’d worked, would have felt . . . traitorous. A little gross, even.

And it would have been a cop-out at best. Jessa was the kind of delightful whirlwind of a person who effortlessly transformed strangers into friends-or short-lived partners, as the case may be-wherever she went, and I knew she’d been hoping a little of that joie de vivre might rub off on me. Tonight’s jewelry-making class was the fourth hopeful outing of its kind, following a disastrous wine-and-paint night (during which I’d gotten the not-artistically-conducive kind of wasted), an equally catastrophic pottery class that had reminded me of Sydney’s love of ceremonial teacups and sent me spinning into a meltdown, and a flower-arranging class that had only managed to unearth memories of the ivory-and-rose-gold palette I’d chosen for the flowers at my own wedding.

A wedding that was never going to happen, much like the perfect life with Sydney that had been meant to materialize thereafter. A life that now seemed not just fictional, but so fantastically unbelievable that I, a flesh-and-blood descendant of the sorceress Morgan le Fay, couldn’t conceive of it as a reality.

“You’re talking about me like I’m some archeological dig, Jess, and we’re troweling for ancient potsherds of joy. What if there’s no zest to unearth? What if I’m just a barren wasteland?” I dropped my chin, the familiar, hateful well of tears pressing against my eyes. I was so damn sick of crying at the slightest provocation, like some weepy damsel stuck in a mire of never-ending distress, but I’d apparently won the sob lottery. Team #Leaky4Life over here. “Permanently broken?”

Excerpted from Back in a Spell by Lana Harper Copyright © 2023 by Lana Harper. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

An awkward first date leads to a sparkling romance between one of the most powerful witches in town and a magical newbie in this rom-com by Lana Harper, New York Times bestselling author of Payback’s a Witch.

Even though she won’t deny her love for pretty (and pricey) things, Nineve Blackmoore is almost painfully down-to-earth and sensible by Blackmoore standards. But after a year of nursing a broken heart inflicted by the fiancée who all but ditched her at the altar, the powerful witch is sick of feeling down and ready to try something drastically different: a dating app.

At her best friend Jessa’s urging, she goes on a date with Morty Gutierrez, the nonbinary, offbeat soul of spontaneity and owner of the Shamrock Cauldron. Their date goes about as well as can be expected: awkward and terrible. To make matters worse, once Morty discovers Nina’s last name, he’s far from a fan; it turns out that the Blackmoores have been bullishly trying to buy the Shamrock out from under Morty and his family.

But when Morty begins developing magical powers—something that usually only happens to committed romantic partners once they officially join a founding family—at the same time as Nina’s own magic surges beyond her control, Nina must manage Morty’s rude awakening to the hidden magical world, uncover its cause, and face the intensity of their own burgeoning connection. But what happens when that connection is tied to Nina’s power surge, a power that she’s nearly as addicted to as Morty’s presence in her life?
Book Links: Amazon |
 
 

Meet the Author:

Lana Harper is the New York Times bestselling author of the Witches of Thistle Grove series. Writing as Lana Popović, she has also written four YA novels about modern-day witches and historical murderesses. Born in Serbia, Lana grew up in Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria before moving to the US, where she studied psychology and literature at Yale University, law at Boston University, and publishing at Emerson College. She lives in Chicago, where she spends most of her time plotting witchy stories and equally witchy tattoos.
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