Blog Tour, Guest Post & Giveaway: The Electric Heir by Victoria Lee

Crushed on by Kelly BookCrushin, on March 16, 2020, in Blog Tour, Giveaways, Guest Post, New Releases / 1 Comment

Blog Tour, Guest Post & Giveaway: The Electric Heir by Victoria Lee

The Electric Heir, the second book in the Feverwake series by Victoria Lee releases tomorrow March 17th, and we are thrilled to bring you a Guest Post blog tour stop today along with a tour-wide giveaway! Check it out below!

I recently read the The Fever King and I loved it and I can’t wait to read The Electric Heir — Available tomorrow!

The Electric Heir (Feverwake #2)

by Victoria Lee
Published by: Skyscape
on March 17, 2020
Genres: Young Adult, Fantasy
Bookshop, IndieBound, Audiobook through LibroFM, iTunes, Amazon
Goodreads

In the sequel to The Fever King, Noam Álvaro seeks to end tyranny before he becomes a tyrant himself.

Six months after Noam Álvaro helped overthrow the despotic government of Carolinia, the Atlantians have gained citizenship, and Lehrer is chancellor. But despite Lehrer’s image as a progressive humanitarian leader, Noam has finally remembered the truth that Lehrer forced him to forget—that Lehrer is responsible for the deadly magic infection that ravaged Carolinia.

Now that Noam remembers the full extent of Lehrer’s crimes, he’s determined to use his influence with Lehrer to bring him down for good. If Lehrer realizes Noam has evaded his control—and that Noam is plotting against him—Noam’s dead. So he must keep playing the role of Lehrer’s protégé until he can steal enough vaccine to stop the virus.

Meanwhile Dara Shirazi returns to Carolinia, his magic stripped by the same vaccine that saved his life. But Dara’s attempts to ally himself with Noam prove that their methods for defeating Lehrer are violently misaligned. Dara fears Noam has only gotten himself more deeply entangled in Lehrer’s web. Sooner or later, playing double agent might cost Noam his life.

Guest Post

I loved how the magic system was very interwoven with science, and the characters need to understand things like physics to make their magic better, as someone who studied science I really enjoyed the realistic aspects of this, what made you delve that deep into your magic system?

Like you said, in the universe of The Fever King, magic can only be used if you understand the science behind it. So to do telekinesis, you have to understand physics—and to heal someone, you have to understand anatomy and physiology. I really enjoyed nerding out over science stuff when writing the book—especially the scenes where Noam was learning how to perform certain types of magic for the first time. I think being a scientist in my day job made me excited about writing a science-based magic system because it’d be one of the only kinds of magic I’d end up being good at. Plus there was just something so aesthetic about the idea of people having to study mundane science so hard to perform fantastical feats.

My Ph.D. is in psychology with a specialization in cognitive-affective neuroscience, which is any kind of neuroscience at the intersection of cognition and emotion. So that accounts for the interest in the hard science. The psychology side…I study social emotions, but particularly I study outrage and how outrage can serve as a catalyst for collective social change. So I think my interest both in hard science stuff and, on the psychology side, in outrage and activism in intergroup contexts, made me really interested in incorporating both science and some of my psychology research into the world of the Feverwake books.

I got to play with medical science some, too, given that magic in these books is a virus, and your strength in terms of using magic is determined by your antibody titer. I have lupus, which is an autoimmune condition, so I know a lot about antibodies—but then I relied on my knowledge as a former EMT and interrogated my partner, who’s a doctor, to figure out the rest of it.

And I’m not gonna lie. I’m one of those kinds of people who just loves to learn new things, so every time I wanted to give someone a magical ability I had to think about and then research how that would work, scientifically, which was really fun and educational.

About Victoria Lee

Victoria Lee grew up in Durham, North Carolina, where she spent twelve ascetic years as a vegetarian before discovering spicy chicken wings are, in fact, a delicacy. She’s been a state finalist competitive pianist, a hitchhiker, a pizza connoisseur, an EMT, an expat in China and Sweden, and a science doctoral student. She’s also a bit of a snob about fancy whisky.

Victoria writes early in the morning, then spends the rest of the day trying to impress her border collie puppy and make her experiments work.

She is represented by Holly Root and Taylor Haggerty at Root Literary.

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