In The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, Mika Moon is a 31-year-old witch who, like other witches around the world, hides who she is. Every 3 months she meets up with other witches in Great Britain for a few hours, but aside from that, they have little to no contact with each other.
But Mika loves magic so much and wants to share it with a community so badly that she creates videos in which she performs magic. She doesn’t expect any viewers to think she is performing real magic, so she is surprised to be contacted by someone looking for a tutor for 3 young witches. All witches end up orphaned at a young age, and these 3 were all found by the same witch, Lillian, and brought to her home, called Nowhere House. However, Lillian is often away from home and the girls need someone to help them learn to control their magic, and there is an upcoming deadline that makes this important. Mika agrees to help.
Mika has never had a home that actually felt like a home. She grew up with a series of nannies and tutors who were all fired and had their memories erased once they observed Mika doing any magic. Although this has led to her having her guard up, she easily falls in love with Nowhere House, the girls, and the other inhabitants of the house. One of them is Jamie, a grump with whom it’s clear she will have a romance.
I enjoyed seeing some of the examples of magic and how interested Mika is in potion making. Although there is a deadline looming, it’s a cozy fantasy and things mostly feel pretty low key and low stakes. I will say that the children all seemed quite precocious, which stretched verisimilitude for me a bit. Unless all witches happen to be precocious like that, which the author doesn’t say, then it’s not very believable to me and took me out of the moment sometimes. Overall, it was a pleasant fantasy read that I would recommend.
Howl’s Moving Castle has also been described as a cozy fantasy, though it didn’t quite feel that way to me. The protagonist is Sophie, a young woman who, as the eldest daughter, is expected to fail as she seeks her fortune. Her younger sisters are sent off to learn trades and enhance their prospects, while Sophie stays with her stepmother after her father dies and helps run their hat shop. Early in the novel, Sophia is cursed by the Witch of the Waste and becomes and old woman. She sets of for the wizard Howl’s castle in the hopes that he can break the curse.
And then . . . I felt like I kept waiting for things to happen. Things do happen, of course. Howl’s castle is a pigsty, and Sophie basically browbeats her way into being the cleaning lady, while she and the fire demon Calcifer have a deal that he will break the curse if she will break the contract and keeps him stuck with Howl. Sophie butts her head into Howl’s and his apprentice Michael’s business, there are worries about what the Witch of the Waste will do to Howl and others, there are missing people to find. But I still felt like I was waiting for something, like Sophie was wasting her time. There is very little time spent on her trying to figure out the contract she needs to break or her checking in with Calcifer about whether he’s figured out how to break her curse. She just gets swept up in this life she’s living now. Maybe I need to re-read this, now that I know that, but I felt like there should have been more dialogue, internal or external, about the curse since that’s why Sophie went to Howl’s castle to begin with.
I did like the upending of tropes. It’s especially noticeable in the beginning. Sophie’s stepmother isn’t a wicked stepmother, though she certainly has some flaw. She treats Sophie and her sister well and doesn’t treat their half sister, who is her biological daughter, as being superior to the other two.
Ultimately I’m not sure how I felt about this book. I kept me entertained well enough, but it somehow felt a little slow. And the romance at the end felt rushed. It was fine, but I’m not likely to read the other books set in the same universe.
