Tag Archives: Katharine Corr

Guest Post – Our Fantasy Coven by Katharine & Elizabeth Corr

Today I am excited to be part of The Witch’s Blood Blog Tour to celebrate the third and final book in the trilogy!

The Witch’s Blood by Katharine & Elizabeth Corr was released on the 8th March 2018 published by Harper Collins Children’s Books and is a must for any fantasy fan!

Today Katharine & Elizabeth are talking about their fantasy coven in this fab guest post…

Just who can you trust when no one around you is who they seem?

The final spell-binding book in THE WITCH’S KISS trilogy by authors and sisters, Katharine and Elizabeth Corr.

Life as a teenage witch just got harder for Merry when her brother, Leo is captured and taken into an alternative reality by evil witch Ronan. Determined to get him back, Merry needs to use blood magic to outwit her arch-rival and get Leo back. Merry is more powerful than ever now, but she is also more dangerous and within the coven, loyalties are split on her use of the magic. In trying to save Leo, Merry will have to confront evil from her past and present and risk the lives of everyone she’s ever loved. Given the chaos she’s created, just what will she sacrifice to make things right?

Our Fantasy Coven

‘Being a witch meant becoming familiar with hundreds of years’ worth of spells and techniques and history. Merry understood the necessity, sort of. She had to be able to cast spells with the other witches so she could become a full member of the coven. Witchcraft was a team sport. Or at least it was supposed to be.’

Merry, our main character in The Witch’s Kiss trilogy, has a love/hate relationship with the coven that she (sort of) belongs to. Excluded initially because her mum refuses to let her practise magic, Merry starts training to join the coven in The Witch’s Tears, but she chafes against the rules and restrictions. And the other coven members aren’t entirely comfortable being around Merry either, especially as her power grows. Still, the coven has an important part to play, for good or ill (no, we’re not going to tell you which!) before the end of The Witch’s Blood. We rather like the idea of having a bunch of powerful witch friends to hang out with, so we’ve decided to put together our own Fantasy Coven (limited to eleven witches, because it’s the closest we’re likely to get to picking a fantasy football team).

Granny Weatherwax (The Discworld books, Terry Pratchett)

One of our favourite Discworld characters, illustrated here by Paul Kidby. Granny Weatherwax is wise, really powerful, sharp as a scalpel, and always does the right thing. Not necessarily the nice thing, mind you. She would be brilliant as our coven leader and would have no trouble keeping the more morally ambiguous members in line.

Nanny Ogg (The Discworld books)

The brown sauce to Granny’s bacon sandwich. Nanny would be the one to keep an eye on the coven’s younger members, and she’d be sure to supply plenty of interesting ‘refreshments’ for those late-night coven meetings.

Maleficent

We’re plumping for the Angelina Jolie version here because a) she’s much nicer than in the Disney cartoon, b) she has cheekbones to die for and c) has wings. Super useful for when your broomstick breaks down.

Hermione Granger (The Harry Potter books, JK Rowling)

As the brightest witch in her generation (or probably almost any generation, let’s face it), we think Hermione would get on really well with Granny Weatherwax. Plus, we’d really like
to see Hermione as part of a team of powerful witches without any of those annoying (and, let’s face it, less talented) wizards hanging around.

Merry Cooper (The Witch’s Kiss trilogy)

Merry doesn’t have Hermione’s application and love of studying, but she is really powerful and she’s determined to take care of the people she loves. Definitely someone we’d like on our side.

Meg (from Meg & Mog, Helen Nicoll/Jan Pieńkowski)

Meg’s spells don’t always go to plan, but we’d still love to have her in the coven: for starters we’d get to pet Mog, which we’d love as we’re both cat people. Plus Meg has all the traditional witchy paraphernalia: cauldron, broomstick, black boots, black dress and pointy black hat. The quintessential witch.

Willow (from Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Super loyal, bookish and fun to hang out with, we think Merry and Willow would get on like a house on fire. Both witches are extremely powerful and at times find if difficult to exercise due restraint: but ultimately both seek to use their power to protect the ones they love. And you can’t blame them for that. Also, being in a coven might help Willow stay on the right side of the line when it came to magic; she has been known to dabble in some very dark spells…

Glinda the good witch (from The Wizard of Oz, L Frank Baum)

Glinda’s outfit choice literally makes pink the new black. We’d like our coven to be as blinged up as possible: sparkly ballgowns and jewel-studded broomsticks all the way. No sneaking around secretly for us! Also, unlike some of the other witches in our coven, Glinda has impeccable manners. She’d be useful when diplomacy is required.

Sally and Gillian Owens (Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman)

Confession time: we haven’t yet read the book on which the Sandra Bullock/Nicole Kidman film is based. Still, from the film version, we think these highly talented siblings would be good coven members: just like Merry and Leo, they’re absolutely devoted to one another, working best as a team. Plus, they have fabulous hair, a keen fashion sense and would certainly – along with Glinda – inject some much-needed glamour into the coven. Not a wart in sight.

Arianwyn (The Apprentice Witch, James Nicol)

Arianwyn is a little bit like Mildred Hubble: she gets off to a slow start, magically speaking. Failing her witch’s assessment, she’s sent off to the remote village of Lull to start life as an apprentice, somewhat in disgrace. However, just like Mildred, there’s much more to this resilient and courageous young witch than meets the eye. Not only is she fiercely loyal, considerate and kind, it turns out she’s way more powerful than anyone realised. All in all, she’s a real sweetie – the sort of witch who would definitely have your back.

Witches we definitely WON’T be letting into the coven: Jadis (aka the White Witch from the Narnia books by CS Lewis), Nancy Downs (The Craft) and Bellatrix le Strange (Harry Potter). We just don’t think any of them are really team players… But what do you think? Who would be in your fantasy coven?

Thank you so much to Michelle for being one of our blog tour hosts!

You can buy a copy of The Witch’s Blood here or from your local bookshop!

About Katharine & Elizabeth Corr

We are sisters and best friends (try writing a book with someone else and you’ll see why that last bit is kind of important). After spending our childhood in Essex, we now live ten minutes away from each other in Surrey. We both studied history at university and went to work in London for a bit. Then we stopped working to raise families, because somehow we missed the memo explaining that children are far more demanding than clients or bosses. When we both decided to write novels – on account of fictional people being much easier to deal with than real ones – it was obvious we should do it together.

Stuff Katharine likes: playing instruments badly; dead languages; LOTR; loud pop concerts; Jane Austen; Neill Gaiman; Loki; the Surrey Hills. Killing off characters.

Stuff Elizabeth likes: sketching, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, cinema, long baths, kitchen discos, Terry Pratchett, Thor, London. Saving characters.

Stuff we both like: YA / non-YA fantasy and science fiction,Star Wars, Star Trek, each other (most of the time).

You can find out more about Katharine and Elizabeth on their website – www.corrsisters.com

Or why not follow them on twitter – @katharinecorr and @lizcorr_writes

Previously on Tales….

You can catch previous posts by Katharine & Elizabeth Corr by clicking on the below links…

Our Favourite Literary Curses

Our Favourite Magical Moments In Literature

Blog Tour

You can follow or catch up on the rest of this fab blog tour at the following stops!

A huge huge thank you to Katharine and Elizabeth for such a superb guest post and for being so lovely to invite me onto the blog tour! Also a huge thank you to Jess at Harper Collins for having me and sending me a copy of the book.

Have you read any of The Witch’s Kiss Trilogy? What did you think? Who would be in your coven? I would love to hear from you! Why not leave a comment using the reply button at the top of this review or tweet me on twitter using @chelleytoy!

Happy Reading!

Guest Post – Our Favourite Magical Moments In Literature by Katharine & Elizabeth Corr

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I am over the moon to have been asked to be part of the blog tour for the second book in this fantasy, witch-y, fairy-tale YA series, The Witch’s Tears by Katharine and Elizabeth Corr.

The Witch’s Tears is due to be released on the 26th January 2017 published by Harper Collins Children’s Books and is the sequel to lasts years debut The Witch’s Kiss.

I literally cannot wait to read this book! Not only is it set to be an amazing read, but Katharine and Elizabeth are just the loveliest.

I’m THAT excited that both books are part of the British Books Challenge January Prize pack with thanks to Harper Collins Children’s.

For my stop on the blog tour Katharine and Elizabeth share their favourite magical moments in literature!

*swishes magic wand*

Can true love’s kiss save the day…?

Electrifying dark magic debut by authors and sisters, Katharine and Elizabeth Corr.

Sixteeen-year-old Meredith is fed-up with her feuding family and feeling invisible at school – not to mention the witch magic that shoots out of her fingernails when she’s stressed. Then sweet, sensitive Jack comes into her life and she falls for him hard. The only problem is that he is periodically possessed by a destructive centuries-old curse.

Meredith has lost her heart, but will she also lose her life? Or in true fairytale tradition, can true love’s kiss save the day?

Our Favourite Magical Moments

We LOVE fantasy in all its various guises, both as readers and as writers. Fantasy opens the door into another world, often literally – whether by stepping through a wardrobe, getting swept up by a tornado or climbing into a painting. In fact, these interfaces of the real and the magical might be our favourite elements of fantasy literature: they hold out the promise that any minute, our ordinary lives might become extraordinary. So here, in no particular order, are the top five magical literary moments from our childhood…

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C S Lewis): Lucy finds Narnia

‘And then she saw that there was a light ahead of her… A moment later she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air.’

Apart from fairy tales, the Narnia stories were our first introduction to fantasy. We both remember exploring an old wardrobe in our grandmother’s house after reading this bit of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. We were utterly crushed not to find a magical land at the back of it.

The Box of Delights (John Masefield): Kay opens the Box for the first time

‘…the Box slowly opened. Inside he saw what he took to be a book, the leaves of which were all chased and worked with multitudinous figures, and the effect that it gave him was that of staring into an opening in a wood.’

We came to this book through first seeing the BBC adaptation. It’s such a wonderful, unique blend of magic and real life (or real life as it was in the 1930s, at least). When Kay first opens the Box he encounters Herne the Hunter and gets to experience life as a stag, a bird and a fish – all within two minutes of human time.

Tom’s Midnight Garden (Philippa Pearce): Tom discovers the garden

‘Tom opened the door wide and let in the moonlight. It flooded in, as bright as daylight – the white daylight that comes before the full rising of the sun. The illumination was perfect.’

Who wouldn’t be intrigued by a clock that strikes thirteen? Tom’s investigation leads to the discovery of the garden that only exists at a special time of night. He goes on to have magical adventures in late Victorian England.

Through the Looking Glass (Lewis Caroll) – Alice climbs through the mirror

‘And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright slivery mist.’

The Looking Glass is another way to escape from reality into a magical world. And yes, we did both check periodically that the mirror over the fireplace at home hadn’t turned into silver gauze. A mirror universe with backwards writing and talking chess pieces was just so tempting

The Dark is Rising (Susan Cooper) – Will awakens on Midwinter Day

‘He was woken by music. It beckoned him, lilting and insistent…There was in this music so much of the deepest enchantment of all his dreams and imaginings that he woke smiling in pure happiness at the sound.’

This is the moment when Will Stanton realises he is not just a normal boy. The music beckons him outside and he discovers a snow-covered landscape from the depths of time, and first encounters the Dark Rider who pursues him throughout the rest of the book.

You can buy a copy of The Witch’s Tears here or from your local bookshop

You can catch a previous post from Katharine & Elizabeth Corr about favourite literary curses here

About Katharine & Elizabeth Corr

Stuff Katharine likes: playing instruments badly; dead languages; LOTR; loud pop concerts; Jane Austen; Neill Gaiman; Loki; the Surrey Hills. Killing off characters.

Stuff Elizabeth likes: sketching, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, cinema, long baths, kitchen discos, Terry Pratchett, Thor, London. Saving characters.

Stuff we both like: YA / non-YA fantasy and science fiction,Star Wars, Star Trek, each other (most of the time).

You can find out more about Katharine and Elizabeth on their website – www.corrsisters.com

Or why not follow them on twitter – @katharinecorr and @lizcorr_writes

Blog Tour

You can follow or catch up on the rest of this fab blog tour at the following stops!

Have you read The Witch’s Tears or the first book The Witch’s Kiss? What did you think? What are your favourite magical moments in literature? I would love to hear from you! Why not leave a comment using the reply button at the top of this review or tweet me on twitter using @chelleytoy!

Happy Reading!

Guest Post – Our Favourite Literary Curses by Katharine & Elizabeth Corr

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I am over the moon to have been asked to be part of the blog tour for this intriguing fantasy witch-y YA, The Witches Kiss by Katharine and Elizabeth Corr.

I literally cannot wait to read this book! The title in itself is full of intrigue and that cover! Hats off to Lisa Brewster for this fab design – you can find an interview with Lisa here!

The Witches Kiss was released on the 30th June 2016 published by Harper Collins Children’s Books.

A huge thank you to Vicki from Harper Collins and Katharine and Elizabeth for having me on this wonderful tour and for sending me a copy of the book.

For my stop on the blog tour, which is the final stop of the tour ,I asked Katharine and Elizabeth for their favourite literary curses!

Read at you peril!

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Can true love’s kiss save the day…?

Our Favourite Literary Curses

Curses are staple ingredients of fantasy and fairy tales. We have three (sort of) curses in The Witch’s Kiss: the curse that turns our prince into a monster, the enchantment that binds him to the evil wizard, and the oath that compels Merry (our hero) to deal with the consequences of the curse in the twenty-first century. So for this, the final stop on our blog tour, we decided to look at our favourite literary curses…

Of Truly Biblical Proportions

‘And unto Adam he said, because thou has hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life…’

According to the Guinness Book of Records the Bible is still the world’s most widely distributed book, and it has curses right at the beginning, in Genesis. The snake gets cursed for tempting Eve, Eve gets cursed for listening to the snake, Adam gets cursed for listening to Eve. And everybody gets kicked out of Eden. It’s all very Old Testament and ends up in lots of other literary creations, including Paradise Lost and Good Omens.

Sleeping Beauty’s Curse

SBC

Thanks to Disney, pretty much the entire universe is familiar with this one. An evil fairy, in retaliation for not being invited to Briar Rose’s christening, puts a curse upon the baby girl: when she reaches her sixteenth birthday she will prick her finger upon a spinning wheel and die. A good fairy attempts to overturn the curse, and although she’s unable to do so, she is at least able to dial it down a smidge. Instead of dying, Briar Rose is doomed to fall into an enchanted sleep for 100 years. And she can only be woken up by a kiss from the son of a king. Somewhere along the way from the original versions of this tale, ‘true love’ was added to the mix, just to make things that extra bit harder (as if snagging royalty wasn’t enough all by itself…).

Beauty and the Beast

BANDBE

As with most fairy tales, there are multiple versions of this particular story. The most famous one (again, thanks Disney!) is the version where the young prince falls victim to a dark curse. One day an old women comes to the castle, asking for shelter from the rain. The prince refuses, whereupon the old woman is revealed to be a powerful fairy. She turns the prince into a hideous beast, declaring that he will only return to his true form upon finding (you guessed it) ‘true love’. Which luckily he does. Still, these fairies! Vengeful lot.

Harry Potter: The Unforgiveable Curses

“Never used an Unforgivable Curse before, have you, boy?” she yelled. She had abandoned her baby voice now. “You need to mean them, Potter! You need to really want to cause pain – to enjoy it – righteous anger won’t hurt me for long – I’ll show you how it is done, shall I?”

Not curses in the strictest sense of the term, but three spells so dark that (as discussed in The Goblet of Fire) their use results in automatic incarceration in Azkaban – at least until legalised during the Second Wizarding War. The three curses are the Killing Curse (Avada Kedavra); the Cruciatus Curse (Crucio) for inflicting intense pain; and the Imperius Curse (Imperio) for controlling the actions of another.

The Red Shoes

REDSHOES

Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale is essentially a morality tale: a warning against the dangers of vanity. It’s also exceedingly grim. And unlike most other literary curses, it has nothing to do with true love.

A young girl, Karen, repeatedly wears her beautiful red shoes to church when she shouldn’t. Karen is vain and selfish and cares little for her adoptive mother; even when the mother is dying Karen goes to a party, once again wearing the beautiful dancing shoes. As a result, she is cursed to dance in her beautiful shoes forever, even after her death, as a warning to vain children everywhere. Eventually the curse is lifted, but not until Karen has had her feet chopped off, has had her way to church barred by her own still-dancing feet, and has died. Lesson learned, we imagine.

LadyHawke

In Joan D Vinge’s fantasy romance the evil Bishop of Aquila, a spurned suitor, curses two lovers to spend an eternity apart, whilst at the same time always being together. The knight Navarre is a man by day and a wolf by night. His lover, the beautiful Isobelle, is a hawk by day and a woman by night. Therefore they are never together in their human form, except for during a few moments between dawn and dusk. To break the curse the lovers need to face the Bishop together on a day when there is no night and a night when there is no day. Luckily, fate intervenes in the form of a solar eclipse and at the right moment the lovers face the bishop and break the curse. One of our favourite books whilst growing up.

Narnia: The Deplorable Word

DEPNARNIA

In The Magician’s Nephew, friends Digory and Polly arrive in a world lifeless but for one inhabitant: the Empress Jadis, who reappears in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as The White Witch. The children learn that the destruction around them is the result of a curse. When Jadis was about to be defeated by her sister she spoke The Deplorable Word, a curse that wiped out all life on her world – literally, everything – and put her into an ageless sleep. What a relief Lord Voldemort didn’t know that one.

511Xw+lHKlL._SX326_BO1,204,203,200_ You can buy a copy of The Witches Kiss here or from your local book shop!

About Katharine & Elizabeth Corr

kandecorr

Stuff Katharine likes: playing instruments badly; dead languages; LOTR; loud pop concerts; Jane Austen; Neill Gaiman; Loki; the Surrey Hills. Killing off characters.

Stuff Elizabeth likes: sketching, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, cinema, long baths, kitchen discos, Terry Pratchett, Thor, London. Saving characters.

Stuff we both like: YA / non-YA fantasy and science fiction,Star Wars, Star Trek, each other (most of the time).

You can find out more about Katharine and Elizabeth on their website – www.corrsisters.com

Or why not follow them on twitter – @katharinecorr and @lizcorr_writes

Blog Tour

Catch up on the rest of the blog tour at the below stops! hc_witches_kiss_blog_tour

A huge huge thank you to Katharine and Elizabeth for such a superb guest post and to Katharine for being so lovely to invite me onto the blog tour! Also a huge thank you to Vicki at Harper Collins for having me and being super wonderful too!

Have you read The Witches Kiss? What did you think? What are your favourite literary curses? I would love to hear from you! Why not leave a comment using the reply button at the top of this review or tweet me on twitter using @chelleytoy!

Happy Reading!

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