I’ve been wanting to read Sangu Mandanna’s The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches for months. One of the reasons I decided to join the Diverse Baseline Challenge this year was to give myself permission to read the books I already have that are not arcs. The Very Secret Society fit one of the prompts for February, a book by a BIPOC author with found family.
At the Cannonball Read 16 Romance Zoom Saturday night, I tried to explain why I love romance. Afterwards, I thought of how I should have said it: romance speaks to who deserves love and acceptance (all of us), how people should be and can be valued and loved, and what family and community can look like. As repetitive as the beats of the genre can be, there are infinite variations and I rarely get tired of reading about people be loved the way they deserve to be loved. The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches is a romantic fantasy rather than a romance, but it is all about who deserves to be loved and how families and communities can be built so that it’s members thrive.
Mika Moon is a witch. Like all witches, she is orphaned shortly after she is born in India. A British white woman named Primrose whisks her away to York where she is raised by a succession of nannies and caretakers. Now as an adult, she moves every 6 months taking jobs here and there, and her mantra is “don’t get attached.” But Mika is lonely and yearns to be able to share her joy in her craft with others. When she gets an invitation to be a witch tutor to three orphaned witches, she has an opportunity to see what growing up a witch could be like.
Mandanna takes a few deserved digs at colonialism. Two white British women collect brown babies and then isolate them from their cultures. The young girls Mika is hired to tutor in witchcraft are Black, Vietnamese, and Palestinian, and their guardian has named them Rosetta, Terracotta, and Altamira.
Mika had mixed feelings about this, not least because it sounded so much like what Primrose had done to her, but now was not the time to have that particular conversation.
“Unusual names,” she commented.
The others had come up to the doors, too, so it was Lucie who replied: “Lillian named them all after great archaeological discoveries.”
“At least one of them must have already had a name when she found them,” Mika pointed out. She had. She didn’t know what it was, just that she hadn’t been born with the last name Moon.
Lillian and Primrose think they are acting in the best interest of the children they’ve taken in, and Primrose believes witches can only survive in secrecy. The whole book is the loveliest rebuke of rugged individualism and perfectionism. Mika finds the beginnings of the community and family she longs for.