Cursed: Jaime Questell Talks About the Curse in By A Charm and A Curse

We have several books, including Meg Kessel’s Black Bird of the Gallows, Kat Colmer’s The Third Kiss, S.D. Grimm’s Summoner, and Jaime Questell’s By A Charm and A Curse about characters who are cursed in one way or another, so we’re doing a blog series about it. We asked our authors to share either how they came up with the curse mythology for their books, whether they’ve ever felt cursed either metaphorically or in a real way, what curse – if any – they could imagine placing on someone or some other character in the future, or who their fave characters in books, tv, or movies who have been cursed.

The curse mythology in By a Charm and a Curse is, in my mind, a much-mutated version of the curse in Beauty and the Beast.

There’s so much to farm out of that curse: the idea that the victim doesn’t know how good they have it until they lose it all; finding someone who can look past the rough exterior to the heart beneath; and how true love can save the day.

But instead of forcing the inhabitants of the carnival to share the burden of the curse as the servants do in the Disney versions of Beauty and the Beast, I wanted to see how things would play out if they benefited from an accompanying charm instead. That was the turning point.

What if the Beast’s servants liked the status quo? What if they didn’t want the Beast to succeed in breaking the curse? Charm started as a short story about a girl who was cursed with a kiss, but became a novel when that curse was paired with a charm.