Blog Tour: The Witch’s Kiss by Elizabeth and Katharine Corr

The Witch’s Kiss by Elizabeth and Katharine Corr

Hi Guys!
Today I am here to share with you all a brilliant guest post from Elizabeth and Katharine Corr to help celebrate the release of their debut book, The Witch’s Kiss!

But first, here’s some information on the book!

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?

Goodreads. Amazon UK.

Favourite Fairytales

By Elizabeth and Katherine Corr

Once Upon A Time….
Don’t those words – the traditional opening words of all fairy tales, everywhere – just send shivers up and down your spine? If there’s one universal form of literature, it’s probably the fairy tale. These stories span eras and cultures; the most famous of them seep into our collective memory like ink into blotting paper. So it’s no surprise that lots of writers choose to re-interpret the ancient themes for their own times, or pick fairy tales as starting points for their own stories. That’s what we did for The Witch’s Kiss, so obviously any list of our favourite fairy tales has to start with the one that inspired us…

1) Sleeping Beauty

Our favourite part of this story is the curse: the drama of the princess pricking her finger on a spinning wheel and then sleeping for a hundred years. We picked this up and ran with it for The Witch’s Kiss. Our Sleeping Beauty is an Anglo-Saxon prince, who deliberately pierces his skin with poisonous black holly and falls asleep for fifteen hundred years…

2) Snow White

There’s so much fantastic imagery in this story. We love the foreshadowing of Snow White’s appearance right at the beginning, as the doomed queen wishes for a child with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood and hair as black as ebony. And then there’s the magic mirror, the glass coffin and the various poisoned articles: combs, corsets, apples. Lots of brilliantly witchy ideas to play with!

3) Hansel & Gretel

This is on our list because of the sibling angle. We’re sisters, and our main character in The Witch’s Kiss, Merry, has a really strong bond with her elder brother, Leo: it’s pretty much them against the world. So we love the fact that in Hansel & Gretel we get to see a brother and sister sticking together and fighting their way through a fairly horrific situation. And then of course there’s the whole gingerbread cottage thing. Living in an edible building has to be fun! At least until it goes mouldy…

4) The Red Shoes

Not so commonly read as the others on this list, possibly because it’s not as old: The Red Shoes was written by Hans Christian Andersen in 1845. It’s also very obviously a morality tale, since the main character is punished for her vanity and for neglecting her ailing mother. We mainly like it because it’s SO GRUESOME. It’s hard to think of another fairy tale where the protagonist ends up having her feet chopped off and even then the feet keep on dancing. The Red Shoes really takes fairy tales to the Dark Side.

5) Rumplestiltskin

We really enjoy stories where people pretend to be things that they’re not, or have things that they don’t, and Rumplestiltskin has this in spades. The father who pretends he has a magically talented daughter; the daughter who vainly goes along with the lie; the strange little man who pretends he is there to help; the king who (presumably) pretends he’s a decent human being in order to get the poor girl to marry him. Even straw pretending to be gold. Misdirection and deceit abound, and the happy ending seems curiously grafted on. Rumplestiltskin is a tragedy waiting to be revealed. Now, there’s an idea for a novel….

About the Authors

Elizabeth and Katharine Corr have been writing since they were children. They keep in touch any way they can, discussing their work via phone, text and skype, and have been known to finish each other’s sentences – and not just when they are writing!

Liz’s Twitter. Katharine’s Twitter. Website.