Morning everyone! If you’ve been around the Twittersphere of late, you may have seen a lot of buzz about debut author, Ellie O’Neill and her novel, Reluctantly Charmed. It’s a novel that cleverly mixes the everyday of 26 year old Kate McDaid’s life with the magical realism of fairies, witches and the mystical in modern day Ireland. Ellie gets the balance of contemporary fiction and magical elements just right in this page turner. Today I’m pleased to welcome Ellie to Sam Still Reading to discuss Reluctantly Charmed with some questions I put to her. Thanks Ellie for stopping by, I really appreciate it!
Here’s the blurb for Reluctantly Charmed to whet your appetite:
Kate McDaid is listing her new-year’s resolutions hoping to kick-start her rather stagnant love life and career when she gets some very strange news. To her surprise, she is the sole benefactor of a great great-great-great aunt and self-proclaimed witch also called Kate McDaid, who died over 130 years ago. As if that isn’t strange enough, the will instructs that, in order to receive the inheritance, Kate must publish seven letters, one by one, week by week.
Burning with curiosity, Kate agrees and opens the first letter – and finds that it’s a passionate plea to reconnect with the long-forgotten fairies of Irish folklore. Almost instantaneously, Kate’s life is turned upside down. Her romantic life takes a surprising turn and she is catapulted into the public eye.
As events become stranger and stranger – and she discovers things about herself she’s never known before – Kate must decide whether she can fulfil her great-aunt’s final, devastating request … and whether she can face the consequences if she doesn’t.
Witty, enchanting and utterly addictive, Reluctantly Charmed is about what happens when life in the fast lane collides with the legacy of family, love and its possibilities … and a little bit of magic.
– See more at: http://books.simonandschuster.com.au/…
You can also read the first chapter of Reluctantly Charmed
here or visit Ellie’s website.
How did the idea for Reluctantly Charmed come into your head? Was it fully formed, or in pieces?
It came in bits and bobs. My original idea was kind of a mis match of the Emperor’s new clothes, everyone is telling her she’s something but she’s pretty sure she’s not. I’m quite a celebrity obsesser (my secret shame) I enjoy their crazy antics, but I view them as entertainment, I love the fashion, their ridiculous love lives, their extravagance. And I wondered, if you put a normal person under the spot light, under the glare of the paparazzi, who has to deal with fans that think they know you better than you know yourself, how would that feel? How would a normal person react to that?
That was my core idea for Reluctantly Charmed, and then it grew legs, many of them!
What made you choose to explore Irish fairies?
A couple of things, I’m aware of the idea of them, I grew up knowing about them as a lot of Irish people do. But I never had a light bulb moment about including fairies in the book, the idea just crept up on me and I let myself drift towards it and started reading about them. And I just fell in love with the stories and the magic around them. They belong to two generations back in Ireland, but because the belief in them was so strong back then, there’s still a lot of superstition and rituals around today. I found this fascinating, that modern Ireland which is such a progressive country still has this beautiful thread of romanticism. I felt it was worth exploring.
Do you believe in fairies?
I choose to believe in the possibility of them. I hope that there’s magic out there. That karma exists, that there’s some great puppeteer in the sky pulling strings to make wonderful things happen. I have that dream, but I’m also a realist, bills need to be paid, bones get broken, feelings get hurt, life can be really hard, and maybe because life can be hard we need to believe in magic even more!
Reluctantly Charmed has a wonderfully light and witty feel to it. It feels like Kate is sitting next to me as I read and I feel I’ve known her forever. How did her voice come about? Is she modelled on someone?
Thank you, what a lovely thing for me to read. Kate isn’t modeled on anyone. I completely lost myself when I was writing her, so I think it’s safe to say that there’s a lot of me in her character. A lot of her inner dialogue, like for example when she’s weighing up reality versus the supernatural, that comes from me, and her romantic disasters are mine too. She had to be a very relatable character for her incredible journey to be believable, and she had to be loveable because she’s going through so much. But she’s her own person, she exists, she lives and breathes, and if I thought she didn’t I’d be devastated. As far as I’m concerned she’s very happy and living in the West of Ireland, and life is going well for her.
Thanks again Ellie! I’ll have my review of Reluctantly Charmed up on the blog early next week. If you’d like to read the book, check out your favourite bookstore/ book department or click on the links below:
Ebook: Amazon AU | Amazon US | Amazon UK |Kobo | Google Play | iBooks
Book: Bookworld |Readings |Booktopia
You can also follow the blog tour on the blogs below:
Sam Still Reading 
Great Q & A 🙂
This is not a book I would pick off the shelf, but having read this it is now on my TBR. I’m happy to meet Ellie through this post. I;m hopping over to her website now.
Reblogged this on tjphull.
I chose this book based on the outline for the novel. I enjoyed the author’s great sense of humour and the basic layout of the novel, including Kate’s character. I was disappointed by the ending since I’ve always loved the concept of fairies. My choice for the ending would have been that the fairies compliment efforts to preserve nature while expressing a sadness over the manners in which people have abused our world. I also felt that the horror of the former priest helping to burn the great aunt could have been more expanded in terms of the struggles women have endured over time. I had started to ‘read’ into the novel that the Famine was blamed on the elder Kate due to her assumed wealth. I guess most readers tend to rewrite a novel as they read. I do enjoy Ellie’s great sense of humour!