Breakaway Books

Authored by Sangu Mandanna; Published 2022; Fantasy

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

To make The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, mix three adorable witchlings with one handsome, gruff guardian, and add a delightful woman who’s never quite fit in. You’ll get a cozy, cute, romantic fantasy that you’ll want to stay with forever.

In The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, Mika Moon answers a very peculiar ad searching for a witch to tutor three young girls in the magical arts. Mika’s lived her whole life isolated from other witches and is hesitant to take on a teaching job but quickly discovers that life at the kids’ mansion is the best she has ever had. But witches normally stay apart for a reason, and the convergence of magic might be too much for Mika to handle without alerting the whole county to the truth of the girls–or at least, without alerting the lawyer who’s beginning to wonder where the owner of the mansion is. Plus, it turns out the girls’ guardians are hiding a very big secret.

This isn’t a novel to pick up for the plot. The dilemma posed by the mansion owner’s lawyer is flimsy at best, and I could think of about ten thousand ways to solve the problem that don’t involve bringing Mika to the mansion. The system of magic is left relatively unexplained, apart from a few key details to hold the plot together, and somehow, I did not care. At its heart, the novel is a cozy fantasy, and what does a cozy fantasy require apart from literal moonlight harvested at midnight, semi-animate magic that appears as golden motes in the air, and a Winter Solstice celebration featuring fairy wine? If that isn’t enough to win you over, the cute/spunky/rambunctious little girls will.

But there are notes of darkness that give the novel slightly more depth than I would have thought: All witches are cursed to become orphans shortly after birth because of a historic mis-cast spell, and so they often find themselves surprisingly alone. Mika suffered through a deeply lonely childhood and has to work to restore her sense of self-esteem and to trust the people around her in order to make her way to love. This love is what the story is really about–yes, romantic love, but there is much more emphasis on the love of community, of being surrounded by people who love and support you. Mika learns that it is possible to survive on her own, but to thrive, she needs her little witchlings and their guardians.

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches might be worth saving for a crisp fall afternoon when you really want to snuggle up with a cozy read. It certainly has the right vibes.