Another go around at cosy, witchy romance, but this one doesn't quite hit the mark.
Back in 2022, I read, enjoyed and reviewed Sangu Mandanna’s The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches. It was cosy and heartwarming, but with just enough depth to keep it the right side of the line of schmaltz, and with a well-developed cast of characters and some genuinely excellent chemistry between the main character and love interest, as well as a decent character arc for that MC outside of just her romance. It wasn’t perfect, by any means, but it was intensely enjoyable fluff and just the right sort of thing for a certain sort of mood.
Thus, when another book in a similar vein was announced, I was delighted enough to pre-order immediately. Publishing is publishing and delays are delays, but A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping came out this July, and I immediately devoured it seeking the same sort of comforting warmth I got from her previous novel.
And I did get that. And that might, slightly, be the problem.
While the details of the plots differ, the two books share a hell of a lot in common, especially in their characters, themes and vibes. Both feature love interests from the UK but not England who seem spiky and unwelcoming to the MC at first but upon further investigation have soft, mushy centres, and are devoted to one or several little girls who aren’t their daughter(s) but whom they care about fiercely nonetheless. They are also very bookish and knowledgeable, and very particular about their books. And hot. But it’s a romance novel so that goes without saying. They are also both slightly outsiders in some way. The main character is likewise slightly an outsider (because racial background, class, upbringing) and has her hangups, especially about her self-worth, but having persevered through many trials and loneliness has a core of determination. Magic sits in the hands of a small and conservative group whose beliefs/strictures the main character chafes against. A lot of people’s biological parents are absolutely terrible. Or dead. Or both. The plot predominantly takes place in a household that offers a supportive sanctuary away from the hardships imposed by the world and those conservative magic users, and which is, at some point, under threat from an external force. The main character ends up in a quasi-family, quasi-teacher role to a younger person with magic that she is not fully prepared for.
There’s probably more that I’m missing, but already, that feels like a pretty chunky overlap. For some of it, I’m tempted to assume it’s just how the author do - especially for the love interest. How many Guy Gavriel Kay novels have I read that contain That One Woman, after all? Many authors do it. And likewise, many authors have their pet themes and ideas that resolve again and again in their work. But this… feels just a little too close.
And even then, maybe I would have rolled with it, except… it’s just not quite as good at nearly all of it as The Very Secret Society is. It’s not terrible! But when you have something that occupies quite so much of so very similar a space, it’s really hard not to feel let down when the second one just doesn’t quite tick those boxes as well as the first. And especially so, when some of those boxes are the romance and the found family, the two key things that these books need to deliver on to be what they so clearly set out to be.
I’ll tackle the found family first. This is a book with a small cast of misfits who live together in the titular inn, because its magic draws them in as someone whom the inn and its owners can help in some way. Some of them, though they don’t get a tonne of attention, feel like they have a safely closed arc (if a relatively short one), like the cousin from Iceland whom the main character, Sera, coaches through a little moment of self-doubt and upset about his relationship with his family. He has his Moment. But there are two characters in that cast whose threads feel, to me, as though they are left hanging. The first is Nicholas, a slightly odd young man who works as a knight reenactor at a local medieval fair and who… certainly seems like he’s in love with the main character. And while he gets his Emotional MomentTM, it is handled mostly off-screen with a brief conversational acknowledgment, and the way he behaves towards the MC is never really addressed. It just sort of… sits there. More significant however is a character we meet right at the very start, whose “help” causes the initial conflict of the book in the prologue, and who continues to play a role of very mixed help and problem-causing right the way through to the end. Her name is Clemmie, and she’s trapped in the body of a fox. And she is a Problem.
Upon finishing the book, it seemed pretty clear to me what her arc was shaped to be, as a mischievous and self-serving person who comes to see the value and love available in the sanctuary of the inn. And some of the beats of it are there. Certainly the ending is trying to have that arc as if it’s been completed. But there aren’t enough moments throughout the story to fully support that arc and make her actions at the narrative climax feel plausible. It just felt a little flat. And there are moments throughout that have this quality - they conform to the overall shape of the narrative but just don’t quite feel fleshed out enough for it to work emotionally or intuitively.
Which brings me to Luke, the love interest, who has exactly the same problem, but far more prominently because well… he’s the love interest in a romance. He’s load-bearing.
One of the great things about The Very Secret Society (look, it’s too long of a title to type out every time and you know what I mean) is that the beginning and end points of the romance felt totally believable, and the middle spent a lot of words getting us from A to B, ramping the chemistry up over scene after scene and making it impossible not to buy. The two characters are very different from one another, and don’t really like each other, but I totally buy how they ended up there, because I have seen it happen. And that’s what we don’t get in A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping. We skip a lot of the necessary middle work, relying a little on flashback and implied previous interaction, and mostly on the reader knowing what shape of story this is and just being willing to go along with it. The ingredients are absolutely there, but they have, to stretch a metaphor, only been given the briefest of stirs. I’d have preferred she used the blender.
But if all that is missing, in a book almost exactly the length of her previous work, what’s there in its place?
Well, a couple of things. For a start, A Witch’s Guide is much more peopled than The Very Secret Society. We get to see more of an actual world - an England - in which this story is taking place, and that England is both a great strength and a minor weakness of Mandanna’s writing. On the one hand, she has a great skill for writing an obviously diverse world that absolutely feels like the world I know in reality - it is just casually peopled by a wide range of people, noticeably but unobtrusively because why would it be obtrusive? That’s just how the world is. And if this book had been set in a city, I would never have given it another thought. But it’s not. It’s set in the rural northwest, and includes some places I was quite familiar with growing up, and which, in my experience, were rather less diverse and wholly less accommodating of difference than, for instance, I have found London to be. And while this is a book that makes a point of the racial, ableist and classist tensions of modern England - they form, in many ways, the core of the narrative conflict - those tensions are predominantly centred Elsewhere, in the magical Guild that exists off in Northumberland, with only a brief nod to racism in the local area (a pub the MC no longer frequents). My experience of the northwest is hardly universal, and I cannot speak for every single village and magical B&B in the area, but in a book where a lot of the location and culture work feels so true, this felt oddly out of place to me.
There is also a brief moment when we are first introduced to characters in that stuffy, old-fashioned magical guild where their snobbery and Englishness has the dial turned to 11 and I likewise felt it just that little… off. But we get a snippet of one of them that hints to that parodic Englishness being a performance, just a little nod, and while that thread isn’t really developed from there, it sows enough discord into the characterisation that I took it much more in stride. This is something being done with purpose. Which makes me assume the other off note is purposeful too, even if I can’t quite grasp it in the moment.
Because the thing is, Sangu Mandanna is excellent at character writing. Even when other elements are awry, she crafts instantly graspable, distinctive characters. When I met each one in this book I instantly got who I was dealing with, and wanted to spend time with them. I wanted to see how they would develop and interact, and the plot was of somewhat secondary significance, a vector through which to reach more interesting character dynamics. That’s still true here, but it feels a little like she’s sacrificed full commitment to it in her core cast to give us a slightly wider supporting one, and it’s not a bargain I think, ultimately, is worthwhile. I’d have rather had a longer novel, or one with fewer characters, but where the dedication to that core cast gave me a fully satisfying set of scenes and interactions, and where the tension was palpable, the development really sold. But that’s not what we’ve quite got here. It’s most of the way there, but it’s missing the spark it really needs, and that I know she has because I’ve seen it before in her work, and the elements needed were all right here in this book, but they just never quite resolved.
It’s still a fun read. She’s still really good at a lot of the key elements needed for this kind of cosy, heartwarming fantasy romance. The message of the core plot is a schmaltzy one, but with its heart absolutely in the right place, and the two main characters feel well-crafted and suited to one another. It’s a romance I really want to believe. But it’s not quite there. Close - so very close - but just not quite at the mark. I would still recommend it as a fun read. I still had fun. But I can’t help but compare it to The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, because that, truly, did have the spark.
--The Math
Highlights:
- A realistically peopled England
- Places that feel absolutely real
- Genuine warmth
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10
Reference: Sangu Mandanna, A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping, [Hodderscape, 2025].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
