Blog Tour: A Wicked Magic by Sasha Laurens (Character Playlist + Giveaway!!!)

Item: A Wicked Magic
Author: Kaity

Posted July 28, 2020 by Kaity in Book Tours, Giveaways, Playlists, Spotlight / 4 Comments

Happy Tuesday and welcome to my stop on the A WICKED MAGIC blog tour! I’m so excited because today I have a character playlist from Sasha Laurens to share with you! This book is truly amazing and I’m so so excited to for you to find out more about it, PLUS enter for a chance to win a print copy!

A Wicked Magic by Sasha Laurens
Published on July 28, 2020 by Razorbill
Genres: YA
Pages: 368
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Dan and Liss are witches. The Black Book granted them that power. Harnessing that power feels good, especially when everything in their lives makes them feel powerless.
During a spell gone wrong, Liss's boyfriend is snatched away by an evil entity and presumed dead. Dan and Liss's friendship dies that night, too. How can they practice magic after the darkness that they conjured?
Months later, Liss discovers that her boyfriend is alive, trapped underground in the grips of an ancient force. She must save him, and she needs Dan and the power of The Black Book to do so. Dan is quickly sucked back into Liss's orbit and pushes away her best friend, Alexa. But Alexa has some big secrets she's hiding and her own unique magical disaster to deal with.
When another teenager disappears, the girls know it's no coincidence. What greedy magic have they awakened? And what does it want with these teens it has stolen?
Set in the atmospheric wilds of California's northern coast, Sasha Laurens's thrilling debut novel is about the complications of friendship, how to take back power, and how to embrace the darkness that lives within us all.

Dan

The Night I Lost The Will to Fight – Cursive

At the beginning of A Wicked Magic, Dan has definitely lost her will to fight. She’s super depressed and she’s been repressing her feelings of guilt over what happened to Johnny—the boy she and her friend Liss accidentally allowed a demon to abduct. Just like the man in this song, Dan needs a catalyst to get her out of this. There’s something kind of angry about the despair in this song too, which I feel captures Dan’s self-destructive side.

Pin – Grimes

I have said before that this song could have been written about A Wicked Magic and it’s true! It totally conveys the dynamic between Dan and Liss. This song is about a friendship that’s chaotic and fun, but it’s also been made toxic by self-destructive behavior.

Ribs – Lorde

This is a really beautiful song about how growing up can be both sweet and painful. Dan spend a lot of time longing for the way things used to be, before magic changed everything. In a lot of ways, she’s living in the past and that nostalgia is preventing her from taking responsibility for the things she’s done.

Dark and Stormy – Hot Chip

Ultimately, Dan decides to face her mistakes and reunites with Liss to try to rescue Johnny. She finally starts actively dealing with the past and begins to understand that she’s not just a victim–she actually has a lot of agency and she can make amends for what she’s done. The lyrics “We’ll make our own luck // outrun the sadness” and “We’re not the same, but we’re intact” speak to that for me.

Stay Beautiful – The Manic Street Preachers

Dan is obsessed with a band called IronWeaks, whose lead singer Rickey IronWeaks went missing and is later found to have killed himself. He’s based on Richey Edwards, the guitarist and lyricist from The Manic Street Preachers, who disappeared in 1995. In A Wicked Magic, Rickey IronWeaks’s music is intensely dark and Dan knows it’s fueling her depression. In real life, Richey Edwards was extremely open about his struggles with depression, substance abuse, self-harm and eating disorders (definitely don’t google him if any of those things are triggers for you). Honestly most of the Manics’ music is deeply disturbing or just plain terrible—I tried to pick their least bad song to include here.

Lexicon Devil – Germs

Johnny bonds with Dan over the death of Rickey IronWeaks, and compares him to Darby Crash, the singer of the classic punk band The Germs who died of a drug overdose. The song they’re listening to at the time, Lexicon Devil, is actually about mind control, and Darby Crash is rumored to have been an aspiring cult leader. Little do Dan and Johnny realize, a cult is actually operating right under their noses while they have this conversation.

SASHA LAURENS grew up in Northern California, where she learned to drive on Highway 1’s switchback turns and got accustomed to the best weather in the world. After studying creative writing and literature at Columbia University, she lived in New York for years and, at various times, in Russia. She currently resides in Michigan, where she is pursuing a PhD in political science.