A supernatural marriage of convenience – #FantasyRomance #ReviewTuesday #Giveaway

Blurb

Modern witches from rival factions. A marriage of convenience. Spells and sparks fly in this slice-of-life fantasy romance.

Whittaker Crawford is the perfect winter sorcerer—practical and self-reliant—but his quiet life is turned upside down when his grandfather gives him an ultimatum. If he wants to inherit the ancestral home he’s spent years restoring, he has to get married. In need of cheering up, his friend convinces him to do something dangerous: crash a summer witch party.

Clover Bronwen is an average summer witch—free-spirited and optimistic. But lately she has longed for a change. A masked stranger at a Halloween party is just the sort of intrigue she’s looking for.

The centuries-old feud between the summer and winter factions may no longer be an all-out war, but their rivalry and disdain are still very much alive. As Whit and Clover adjust to one another, their bonds with family and friends fray. How much are they willing to sacrifice for an enemy they just met?

Excerpt

With a sudden gust of wintry wind, the warm campfire was blown out, and everyone was plunged into darkness.

Gasps and murmurs traveled through the group. “A bad omen,” someone whispered near Whit over the sound of Alexandre’s snickering.

Of course, Alexandre wasn’t about to let an opening like that go.

“Don’t worry,” the Swedish Chef said. “Even the darkest night comes to an end. Take the hands of those on either side of you.”

Whit took Alexandre’s hand and squeezed it in warning. That’s enough. Even if their magic is waning, they could mess us up with this many of them here. We aren’t at full power either.

Whit stiffened as a jolt ran through him when the woman on his other side slipped her hand into his.

Her hand was small and thin but warm.

“Fear not the darkness, fear not the night,” the Swedish Chef said.

Everyone else, including Whit and Alexandre repeated his words.

“We spark this fire with inner light.”

As everyone repeated the spell, the magic of the summer witch holding Whit’s hand flowed into him. It was heady and intoxicating like a humid rain in a garden bursting with violets, lilies, orchids, and gardenias. The sweetness of honey and plum were mellowed by the depth of amber and vanilla. Whit’s head spun as her magic filled him with giddiness.

He turned his head toward her while the fire sparked back to life, reawakened by the collective magic.

Her face tilted up at him, and their eyes met in the dim flicker of the fire’s glow.

Review by Lisabet Sarai

Whittaker Crawford is a typical winter sorcerer. He appreciates order and rarely acts without a plan. Spontaneity and improvisation make him nervous. Yet when his close friend Alexandre suggests they crash a Halloween party organized by the summer witches, he finds himself agreeing, even though he understands they wouldn’t be welcome at the gathering if their identities were known.

Maybe it’s fate. Or magic. At the party he rescues a lovely young lady from a boorish guy’s unwanted attentions and impulsively gives her a kiss. That kiss turns out to be much more than he bargained for, a heart-to-heart connection laced with mutual enchantment. The next day he tries to dismiss his uncharacteristic reactions as an unimportant deviation, but the seeds of disruption and change have been sown in his well-managed life.

Meanwhile, his grandfather has given him an ultimatum. If he wants to inherit the beloved house that has been in his family for generations, he must marry before the winter solstice. The last thing Whit wants is a wife, but he needs to act or lose what he thinks is his heart’s desire.

Summer witch Clover Bronwen loves her family and her job, delivering flowers and bringing joy to the recipients. Lately, though, she’s been feeling stuck, wondering where her life is leading her. Whit’s kiss frees something within her. Though he’s a stranger, the gods and the omens tell her that she’s meant to be with him. When he abruptly proposes, she agrees without hesitation, trusting her intuition and believing they’ll come to know and love one another in time.

In The Winter Sorcerer and the Summer Witch, D. Lieber brings a magical twist to the classic marriage of convenience and enemies-to-lovers tropes. The author constructs a plausible feud between the winter and summer factions. It’s not quite Montagues and Capulets, but the summer folk can’t understand why members of the winter faction focus so much on death and interact with ghosts. Meanwhile the winter side looks at the summer witches as flighty, disorganized and dangerous, especially given the way they consort with the fae and other magical creatures that infest nature.

As you might expect, Whit’s and Clover’s marriage does not proceed smoothly, though each cannot help learning from and being changed by the other. Hostility from family members is only part of the problem. Clover takes her role as wife very seriously, but Whit feels compelled to fight his attraction to her (though there’s no rational reason for him to do so), desperately trying to cling to his plan for a platonic solution to the problem posed by his grandfather.

I enjoyed reading The Winter Sorcerer and the Summer Witch. The animosity between the two magical factions is nicely described. As an outsider, you can see how each side would be enriched by opening up to the other – and this is, of course, what ultimately happens in Whit’s and Clover’s relationship. Whit and Clover are both appealing characters, young people with blind spots like everyone else. Their magical abilities are secondary, and indeed don’t help at all in sorting out their emotional issues.

My main complaint about the book is one I tend to level at a great deal of the romance I read, namely, that the progress and resolution of the plot were obvious and predictable from a very early stage in the story. From their first kiss it’s clear that Clover and Whit have fabulous chemistry, but it takes more than three hundred pages (and multiple weeks of marriage) for them to actually become intimate. The obligatory break-up before this scene didn’t really threaten their love at all. I found myself more impatient than worried about what would happen next. I would really prefer a bit more suspense or a few more surprises.

Most romance readers aren’t as critical as I am, however. Rather than reading for surprise or enlightenment, they seem to want to join the characters on a familiar emotional journey. Even though the ending is visible from a long way off, that doesn’t seem to spoil their enjoyment.

If this describes you, then you’ll probably like The Winter Sorcerer and the Summer Witch even more than I did.

About the Author

D. Lieber has a wanderlust that would make a butterfly envious. When she isn’t planning her next physical adventure, she’s recklessly jumping from one fictional world to another. Her love of reading led her to earn a Bachelor’s in English from Wright State University.

Beyond her skeptic and slightly pessimistic mind, Lieber wants to believe. She has been many places—from Canada to England, France to Italy, Germany to Russia—believing that a better world comes from putting a face on “other.” She is a romantic idealist at heart, always fighting to keep her feet on the ground and her head in the clouds.

Lieber lives in Wisconsin with her husband (John) and cats (Yin and Nox).

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D Lieber will be awarding a $10 Bookshop.org Gift card to a randomly drawn winner.

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