Spotlight & Giveaway: The Woodsmoke Women’s Book of Spells by Rachel Greenlaw

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Rachel Greenlaw to HJ!

Hi Rachel and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, The Woodsmoke Women’s Book of Spells!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

The Woodsmoke Women’s Book of Spells is about Carrie Morgan, who returns to her witchy small town of Woodsmoke after ten years away to renovate her late grandmother’s cottage. She meets a man who helps her renovate the cottage, who appears as the frost forms in the autumn. But her family warn her that he might not be real, that he could be a curse sent by the mountains to punish her for leaving in the first place, and that if she falls in love, he may disappear as the frost thaws in spring, leaving her broken heart behind…
 

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

“The rooms upstairs are just as I remember. Peeling wallpaper, bare floorboards. The kind of rooms that hold so many memories, pressed like words into their walls.”

“After I left Woodsmoke, I chased that ghost, that deep sense of belonging I craved elsewhere. I searched for it down the many steps of Positano and in the cramped streets of the Gothic Quarter in Barcelona. I sought it out in tiny flats, in a two-bedroom house on the outskirts of Manchester, even in a rented cottage by the harbor in St. Ives.
But I didn’t belong in any of these places, or with anyone else.”

“She’s lost again, lost in a labyrinth of yesterdays, feeling her way through dimly lit tunnels, clutching a spool of unwinding thread.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• The cottage Carrie renovates was originally going to be a tiny house that she would build. But after some research, I realised how tricky so many of the steps would be, and swiftly abandoned the tiny house for something I knew more about. One day, I might still write that tiny house story…
• Cora Morgan discusses her favourite classical music, which is a direct insert of my own taste in one of the scenes.
• The mountain range and town of Woodsmoke are entirely fictional.

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

Carrie is attracted by his kindness, and his calm. They first hold hands watching a rare bird in the woods growing around the mountains, and it’s a tipping point. Matthieu falls in love despite himself, and despite the secret he’s harbouring…

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

The final scene had me in tears writing it, because it’s the culmination of Carrie’s journey to belonging.

“Auntie Carrie.
Just those two words, twined together. That is the greatest gift
of all.”

Readers should read this book….

To fall into the turn in the seasons, and to fully embrace tawny autumnal leaves, pumpkin season, scented candles and frost dusting the fields in the mornings.

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

I am currently working on a secret book, which is not yet announced.

My next release is Shadow and Tide, the second instalment in my YA fantasy series which is out on March 4th for readers in the US.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: Three copies of THE WOODSMOKE WOMEN’S BOOK OF SPELLS, US only

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: If you were to add a story or a spell to the Morgan Compendium, the book featured in The Woodsmoke Women’s Book of Spells, what would it be?

 
a Rafflecopter giveaway

 
 

Excerpt from The Woodsmoke Women’s Book of Spells:

This is the beginning of chapter 2, when we first meet Cora Morgan…

She’s back,” Cora gasps at six that morning. She fumbles for the
lamp, twisting the tiny switch until a glow bathes her bedroom.
She smiles up at the ceiling, the one she has stared at for
fifty-five
years, ever since she moved into this house as a married
woman. “She’s back.”
She cackles, forcing wakefulness into her limbs as she gets out
of bed, smoothing her plait of hair over one shoulder. She knows
she should cut it. That keeping it, this long rope of white and
gray, is fanciful. But it’s how she’s worn her hair all her life, and
she’ll be damned if she’ll change that now.
She pads out of her bedroom, leaving the indentations of two
people on the crinkled sheets. She doesn’t like to make the bed
this early. It’s not the first thing she wants to do each day, day in,
day out, for time eternal. It’s not the way she wants to begin her
morning. The hallway is dark, but she detests using the electric
just for herself. So she fumbles her fingertips along the wallpaper,
feeling the familiar grooves, the slight ridge where Howard didn’t
hang it quite right. It used to annoy her, but like everything, time
has smoothed that frustration away. She relents when she gets to
the kitchen, flipping the switch to light the space where she has
spent most of her hours, her days. She starts this day the way she
likes to start them all—by
making coffee.
She makes her coffee slowly, savoring each step. And as each
moment passes, with every breath, she thinks of Carrie. How her
WoodsmokeWomensBook_9780063378254_1P_EB0304_cc21.indd 10 3/4/24 4:58 PM
The Woodsmoke Women’s Book of Spells 11
arrival must have felt momentous, as it does to her. How Carrie
will have stepped across the threshold of Ivy’s cottage, her eyes
snagging on every detail, snapping to the light switch she knows
won’t work. Standing in the kitchen at the back and staring up
at the vast, all-consuming
mountains. Cora hopes Carrie greeted
them. She hopes they will welcome her grandniece home.
As she crosses her own kitchen, she wonders if Carrie will stay
this time. If this cottage, Ivy’s cottage, will be the glue that holds
her here. If it’s enough.
Cora reaches up, hooking her fingers around the handle of the
four-cup
French press in the cupboard, and pulls it toward her.
She hums a tune that suddenly surfaces in her mind, a tune that
conjures up scabbed knees and school dinners of lumpy mashed
potato and conkers foraged in the woods, tied with string. She
remembers how she and her sister would smash them together,
enjoying epic battles that trailed across the autumns of her girlhood.
Cora falters for a moment, picturing Ivy’s narrowed eyes,
her nimble fingers, her gray cardigan with the patches on the
elbows and the hole on the left sleeve, right near her wrist. She
blinks down at the spoon in her hand and forgets where she is.
Then the scent plumes up from the coffee bag and she resumes
her humming as the kettle boils, thoughts of conkers and Ivy
swept somewhere back to the recesses of her mind. She swirls the
hot water into the press, the grounds coloring it like dirt. She gets
two mugs out of the dishwasher. Her favorite. Howard’s favorite.
A smile tucks itself into the corners of her mouth as the back door
opens, letting in a cloud of cold and dark.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

In a magical new direction for One Christmas Morning author Rachel Greenlaw, an evocative and mysterious story about lost love and the magic of coming home, for readers of Adrienne Young and Breanne Randall.

There is an old tale woven through the mountain town of Woodsmoke about a stranger who appears as the first snow falls in winter, who will disappear without a trace as the frost thaws in spring, leaving a broken heart behind.

Carrie Morgan ran from Woodsmoke ten years ago, and the decision has haunted her ever since. Spending a decade painting and drifting around Europe, she tries to forget her family’s legacy and the friends she left behind. But the Morgan women have always been able to harness the power of the mountains surrounding the town, and their spells—and curses—are sewn into the soil. The mountains, they say, never forget.

Sure enough, when Carrie’s grandmother dies and leaves behind her dilapidated cottage, she returns to renovate—certain she will only be there for one winter. She meets Matthieu as the temperature dips, a newcomer who offers to help refurbish the cottage. Before long, and despite warnings from her great-aunt Cora of the old stories, Carrie finds herself falling for the charming stranger. But when the frost thaws in spring, Matthieu goes missing.

Carrie is convinced he’s real, and he’s in danger. As she fights her way across the mountains to find him, she must confront all the reasons why she left Woodsmoke and decide whether the place she’s spent the last decade running from is the home she’s been searching for.

Rachel Greenlaw, the beloved author of One Christmas Morning, returns with another beautifully crafted, emotionally charged, and romantic tale about lost love and the magic of coming home.
 
 

Meet the Author:

Rachel Greenlaw grew up in North Cornwall, surrounded by wild moorland and studied creative writing at university before moving to an island in the middle of the Atlantic, with all the allure of tropical palm trees in the summer and spine-tingling storms in the winter. When she’s not wandering the beaches and nature trails, she’s dreaming up her next story. She is the author of One Christmas Morning and the Compass and Blade trilogy.