Chantress Alchemy Blog Tour {Guest Post and Giveaway}

I'm thrilled to have the Chantress Alchemy Blog Tour stopping by today with a fabby fab Guest Post by author Amy Butler Greenfield and Giveaway...

Chantress Alchemy

(Chantress Trilogy #2)

by Amy Butler Greenfield

May 6, 2014

Margaret K. McElderry Books

352 pages

Lucy races against time and magic in this sequel to the “richly and thoughtfully written” (Publishers Weekly) Chantress.
Lucy is the last Chantress, the only remaining girl who can sing magic into the world. Since she defeated the evil Lord Scargrave, England has changed—and not for the better. With crops failing and the people rebelling, Lucy is called urgently back to King Henry’s court. His Inner Council is convinced that making gold through alchemy will save England. But a critical element to the alchemical process has been stolen. Lucy is tasked with finding it with her magic… or else. And until she succeeds, the castle is on lockdown.
Court too has changed. Scargrave's brutal Chantress-hunter has become King Henry's closest advisor. Lucy’s beloved Nat has fallen out of favor and is shunned by his colleagues; their romance means trouble for both of them. Worst of all, something goes wrong with Lucy’s magic. The palace is a labyrinth, and there’s a monster at its heart — a monster who may have the power to defeat Lucy once and for all. 
Amy Butler Greenfield returns to the beguiling world of Chantress for a suspenseful tale of courtly intrigue, music, and magic in Chantress Alchemy.

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Building a Palace for Chantress Alchemy

by Amy Butler Greenfield

In Chantress Alchemy, Lucy grapples with the pressures of being King’s miracle-maker.  As the most powerful woman in the kingdom, she has many enemies, and when she is summoned to Court to unmask a traitor, she soon finds she is in danger of becoming a prisoner herself.  But where should that Court be?  

My books take place in an alternate 17th-century England, where young Henry IX sits on the throne.  Whenever possible, I like use real places for my settings, although I often give them a magical twist.   But while there were plenty of palaces in the real 17th-century England, none of them seemed quite right for this story.  

So what did I do? I practiced a little writer’s alchemy and dreamed up a palace of my own.  A palace that was opulent and mysterious and occasionally downright malevolent. A palace with secrets and shadows.  A palace where spies and assassins could lurk.  And I did it by putting together two ancient royal houses that actually existed, both of them much admired in their day.

One of them is Greenwich Palace, a favorite haunt of the Tudors.  Built on a bend of the River Thames by a man who was later acclaimed a traitor to the Crown, the real-life Greenwich Palace fell on hard times in the 1600s and was demolished. But in my world, the palace has been expanded instead, so that it rivals one of the most remarkable houses in all England: Knole.

Knole is real – and unlike Greenwich Palace, it still exists.  I went to visit it shortly before I started writing Chantress Alchemy.  Once owned by Henry VIII, it’s a rare example of what’s known as a calendar house.  It’s said to have 365 rooms, 52 staircases, 12 entrances and 7 courtyards.  As you approach its multitude of turrets and chimneys and peaked roofs, it looks less like a house than a medieval walled town.  

And oh, what treasures can be found inside!   Creaking galleries full of gilded portraits.  Beds hung with crimson silk and spangled velvet.  Painted staircases. Brussels tapestries.  Carvings of mermaids and monsters.  And always, around every corner, yet another room…

It’s a house you could lose yourself in, a house that could swallow you whole. And through the magic of writing, it shifted and grew and translated itself to Greenwich—until I had exactly the palace I needed for Chantress Alchemy.

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Amy Butler Greenfield was on her way to a history Ph.D. when she gave into temptation and became a writer. Among other honors, her books have won a PEN/Albrand Award, the Veolia Prix du Livre Environnement, and a Beacon of Freedom Award.

Amy grew up in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State and went to Williams College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, she studied Renaissance Europe, imperial Spain, and colonial Latin America. She now lives with her family on the edge of the Cotswolds in England, where she writes, reads, and bakes double-dark-chocolate cake.

She loves music, romantic adventure, history, quirky science, and suspense, which explains how she came to write her first YA novel, Chantress. Her next book, Chantress Alchemy, will be published in May 2014.

(this is a blog tour wide giveaway)

2 Finished copies of CHANTRESS ALCHEMY from Simon Teen 
(US Only)

1 signed finished copy of CHANTRESS ALCHEMY from Amy 
(International)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Tour Schedule

Week One:

5/5/2014- The Eater of Books!- Interview

5/6/2014- Word Spelunking- Guest Post

5/7/2014- Reviews By Molly- Review

5/8/2014- A Dream Within A Dream- Interview

5/9/2014- Unabridged Bookshelf- Review

Week Two:

5/12/2014- A Bookish Escape- Review

5/13/2014- Such a Novel Idea- Guest Post

5/14/2014- Fiktshun- Interview

5/15/2014- Fiction Freak- Review

5/16/2014- Two Chicks on Books- Guest Post