Queen Saskia is the wicked sorceress everyone fears. After successfully wrestling the throne from her evil uncle, she only wants one thing: to keep her people safe from the empire next door. For that, she needs to spend more time in her laboratory experimenting with her spells. She definitely doesn’t have time to bring order to her chaotic library of magic.

When a mysterious dark wizard arrives at her castle, Saskia hires him as her new librarian on the spot. ‘Fabian’ is sweet and a little nerdy, and his requests seem a little strange – what in the name of Divine Elva is a fountain pen? – but he’s getting the job done. And if he writes her flirtatious poetry and his innocent touch makes her skin singe, well . . .

Little does Saskia know that the ‘wizard’ she’s falling for is actually an Imperial archduke in disguise, with no magical training whatsoever. On the run, he’s in danger from Saskia’s enemies and her new-found allies, too. So when Saskia finally discovers the truth, will their love save them – or be their doom?

Wooing the Witch Queen is out today! You can order your copy HERE

Subverting the Gothic in Wooing The Witch Queen

by Stephanie Burgis

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the 17 years since I sold my first trilogy, it’s that it’s always smartest to write what I truly love. Markets change, industry professionals disagree on what will be the next big thing, and every long-time professional writer I know has been through at least one bleak period where they believed they would never sell a book again…

But when we write what genuinely brings us joy, then every completed book is a win even if they don’t sell (or if, like three of my own books so far, they have to wait 10 years or more to sell, once the market has caught up with them).

As a reader, I’ve been a fan of romantic fantasy for decades, starting long before the current buzzword ‘romantasy’ was invented. After imprinting hard on both JRR Tolkien and Jane Austen as a kid, romance and fantasy felt like the perfect combination to me from the beginning. So, in the 1990s, I gobbled up novels by Judith Tarr, Mercedes Lackey, Tanya Huff, and Emma Bull; I fell hard for the works of Nalini Singh, Thea Harrison, and Kresley Cole in the early 2000s; and I wrote my own first romantasy novel in 2005, fighting against all the toxic messaging from some subsections of the f/sf community about how any fantasy that involved romance must be somehow ‘lesser’ in objective value or intellect the non-romantic kind. 

(In a word: PIFFLE.)

But it wasn’t until 2018, when my own career had already been through multiple shifts and turning points, when I first got the idea for the book that would become Wooing the Witch Queen (along with the other two books that would follow it in my Queens of Villainy trilogy). At the time, I was focusing on writing MG fantasy novels, only self-publishing romantasy novellas for adults on the side. 

But ohhh the idea of these novels tugged at me from the beginning! I loved all three of the wicked queens who would ally together against an empire – and each book in its own way had the potential to take so many elements I’d devoured in different subgenres of romance and flip them into fun new directions. 

Wooing the Witch Queen takes the basic romantic coupling structure that I’d devoured in classic Gothic and paranormal romances from Jane Eyre onwards: the sinister, powerful and mysterious hero brooding in his castle (or mansion) on the hill and the slightly younger, less visibly powerful/experienced heroine, who takes a position in his employ and finds herself falling for him despite all the terrifying rumors…

But this time, it’s Queen Saskia who’s feared across the gaslamp-lit continent (an analogue for a very different kind of 19th-century Europe in which a pantheon of gods is real and magic is evident everywhere) for her terrifying magical powers and notorious wickedness. Much like Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty, she lives in a sinister castle full of what appear (to judgmental outside eyes) to be her evil and monstrous minions…

And just like the standard Gothic novel heroine, Felix is the one who accepts a position in her employ, under disguise and on the run from other enemies. He is the one who slowly discovers his own inner strength during his time in her castle, surrounded by “monsters” who turn out to be a found family to cherish – and he is the one who first offers the powerful, sinister witch queen a tenderness that she’s never known, while she gifts him her fierce protection.

Because I love fantasy every bit as much as I love romance (and also, I’m just a die-hard history geek), this book is also packed with delicious political intrigue, interfering goddesses, and magical spectacles. However, overwhelming every other consideration, my top goal as I wrote was just to make this story as deliciously fun for myself as I could, in hopes that my readers would sense and share that joy.

This may be a (spooky-)cozy book, but it never pretends that bad things can’t happen, just as they do in our real world. Both my hero and heroine have experienced trauma in the past, but together, they’re ready to fight for a better future now, one full of hope and true comfort. We all need that kind of stubbornly persistent, empowering hope in our lives – and I hope that Wooing the Witch Queen can offer readers a taste of it, along with a virtual hug of much-needed comfort, as we fight our own battles in the real world now.

Joy is resistance – and (at least for me), this book is full of it.

Wooing the Witch Queen is out today! You can order your copy HERE

Stephanie Burgis (she/her) grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, but now lives in Wales with her husband and two kids, surrounded by mountains, castles and coffee shops. She attended the Clarion West science fiction & fantasy writing workshop in 2001, just a year after completing her time as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Vienna, studying music history, in 1999-2000. After spending three more years as a PhD student studying opera history at the University of Leeds in the U.K. (focusing on opera and politics in 18th-century Vienna and Eszterháza, and doing the research that would later result in her first novel for adults, Masks and Shadows), she went to work for a British opera company and stayed there until the onset of a serious chronic illness, M.E./CFS, forced her to give up work outside the home and focus purely on her writing (and, later, on her parenting, too).

Since then, she has published over forty short stories for adults and teens in various magazines and anthologies. Her most recent MG fantasy novel is The Raven Throne (Bloomsbury 2023). Her most recent publication for adults is the romantic fantasy Claws and Contrivances. Her Queens of Villainy trilogy of fantasy rom-coms will be published by Tor Bramble in the US and UK, starting with Wooing the Witch Queen in February 2025.