Reluctantly Charmed (46 page)
Read Reluctantly Charmed Online
Authors: Ellie O'Neill
9. Kate handles the truth about her ancestor the Red Hag fairly well. How do you think you would feel if, like Kate, you found out that you were the descendant of someone who was considered evil and murdered by his or her contemporaries?
10. Do you agree with Kate’s decision not to share the real seventh Step? What would you have done in her position? Should she still have inherited the blue bottle even though she didn’t actually do what the will required of her?
11. What do you make of Kate losing her hair? Discuss the symbolism in her supposed punishment from the fairies.
12. Kate’s journey with the Seven Steps changed her. She felt distanced from the people closest to her because no one could really understand what she was going through. She acknowledges, “
I wasn’t the person I had been.
” Discuss the ways that Kate changes and evolves throughout the story. Have you ever had an experience where you came out feeling like you were no longer the same person?
ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB
1. Every year on Kate’s birthday, she has dinner with her parents at the same Italian restaurant and they recount the story of her birth: “It’s a redhead!” Do you have any specific birthday traditions in your family? Or funny stories that you tell every year for the occasion?
2. Have you thought of what your fairy name might be? Go around the group and try to come up with a fairy name for each member of your book club.
3. What childhood beliefs have you held onto in adulthood?
4. At the end of the book, Kate says, “
I’ll keep loving nature and enjoying every beautiful moment in it. I’ll keep having fun, and singing and dancing and laughing, just like they asked us to.
” Not everything in the Seven Steps was manipulative. What can you appreciate from them? Pick one or two of the more positive aspects from the fairies’ instructions and try following them.
5. To learn more about fairies and Irish folklore, visit the website
ireland.mysteriousworld.com/Mystery/Folklore/FairyTales/
, or pick up a copy of W. B. Yeats’
Fairy & Folk Tales of Ireland
.
A CONVERSATION WITH O’NEILL
You’ve said this story came to you in a roundabout way from your grandmother. Do you think she truly believed in fairies?
I really don’t know—I’d love to be able to ask her that. She may just have been erring on the side of caution. My granny was a formidable woman who shed her rural upbringing with delight and made a very modern life for herself in Dublin. She always wore a fur coat, had her nails polished, and worked when it wasn’t the thing for a woman to do. But there were traditions from her upbringing that she was never able to shake, and one of them was talking about fairies. Her childhood was colored with stories of the nasty tricks the Little People had performed. I touch on this in
Reluctantly Charmed
—how sometimes it’s hard to lose childhood beliefs, that often there’s a niggle of doubt about something you heard as a kid. But did she truly believe? I don’t know.
Do you believe in fairies? Or in magic, or the existence of something beyond?
I choose to believe in the possibility of them. I hope 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 . . . but maybe because life can be hard we need to believe in magic even more!
What kind of research was involved in the writing of this novel? Was there anything particularly interesting that you came across while researching?
I read a lot of books (shocker:
Writer in Reading Scandal!!!
). I
was living in Ireland while I was writing, and so I spoke to a lot of people to hear their stories and get their opinions on fairy lore, which was ridiculously good fun. William Butler Yeats was probably my primary source of inspiration from a literary point of view; I fell in love with his idea of fairies. His poems and his imagery of Ireland is really breathtaking.
Folklore is fun—its very nature as an oral tradition leaves everything in a gray area. There’s a lot of wiggle room for truth and fact, and that’s part of the appeal. It’s good old-fashioned sci-fi!
Is Knocknamee a real place? Or based on one? Have you ever been anywhere like it?
It’s fictitious. Sorry! But there are plenty of places like it in the west of Ireland. Little pockets of heaven are there, just waiting for you to stumble across them at the turn in a road.
How do you think you would personally handle fame and media attention, like Kate had to?
I am a bit—OK, a
lot
—celebrity-obsessed. I read my show-biz blogs and magazines, check out the fashion, discuss the romances. I love the crazy world of selfies and surgery. But could I handle being in it? Probably not. I am happy to remain a voyeur, with no fan clubs and all of my own wrinkles.
If you had the chance to go to Tír na Nóg and live in the land of eternal youth, would you?
Imagine—a world with no wrinkles, no creaks in your back, no aches and pains? Amazing. Just think of the money you’d save on creams alone. The only problem with Tír na Nóg is that once you’re there, you can never leave. And as exciting a prospect as it
is to still be raving well into my nineties, I wouldn’t want to be without my family.
Why do you think the Irish make such good storytellers?
Have you ever walked away from an Irish person and thought,
Well, they really didn’t have much to say for themselves
? You see? It doesn’t happen. The ability to chat is in our DNA, and somewhere along the way we learned that a beginning, a middle, and an end, with maybe a few jokes and some bad language thrown in, might get you a pint in the pub and win you a few friends.
Are there any particular writers or works that inspired your interest in writing a story of magical realism?
I read a broad spectrum of genres. A good story is what appeals to me, whatever the backdrop.
What has been the most exciting part of the publishing process so far?
I remember when the contract came through—I was five months pregnant and literally shaking from head to toe in disbelief and thinking that all this adrenaline couldn’t be good for the baby! It was surreal, after countless rejections, to suddenly have a contract in front of me. I was dumbstruck by it all.
What’s up next for you?
I’m working on another book and running after a toddler, so life is pretty full and busy right now.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
E
LLIE
O
'NEILL
took the long way around. She sold spider catchers in Sydney, flipped burgers in Dublin, and worked in advertising in London. All the while, she had that niggling feeling she had stories to tell. So, at thirtysomething, she made the brave leap and moved back in with her parents to get the job done. Swapping the dizzy disco lights of London for their suburban Dublin house, she scribbled away, knowing that there was something about Irish fairies she needed to share with the world.
Then, most unexpectedly, Ellie fell madly in love. The only catch was that he lived in Australia. True to form, she couldn’t ignore the magic and followed her heart to Oz for what was supposed to be a long holiday. Five years later, Australia is home to Ellie, her Joe, and their fabulous baby (with an Irish name no one can pronounce). They live in Geelong, and Ellie is currently working on her second book.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Ellie-ONeill
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Touchstone
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Ellie O’Neill
Originally published in 2014 in Australia by Simon & Schuster (Australia) Pty Ltd.
Four lines from “The Stolen Child” by W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) are reproduced in
Reluctantly Charmed
, as are four lines from “The Famine Year” by Lady Jane Francesca Wilde (1821–1896), who wrote under the name of “Speranza.”
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First Touchstone trade paperback edition March 2015
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Interior design by Jill Putorti
Cover design by Eileen Carey
Cover photograph: Woman © Maja Topcagic/Trevillion Images, Flowers © Jon Schulte/Photographer's Choice RF/ Getty Images, Landscape © Flash Parker/Moment/Getty Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Neill, Ellie, 1976-
Reluctantly charmed : a novel / Ellie O’Neill.
pages cm
Summary: “A lighthearted and relatable debut novel about an advertising copywriter who upends her ordinary life and captures the attention of the world after publishing a seven-part treatise on the existence of fairies”—Provided by publisher.
1. Single women—Fiction. 2. Fairies—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3615.N4415R46 2015
813'.6—dc23
014044531
ISBN 978-1-4767-5755-1
ISBN 978-1-4767-5756-8 (ebook)
Contents
