Anime Review: Witch Hat Atelier

Children, magic, intrigue, and gorgeous animation in this coming of age adventure.

A girl on a quest to save her mother tries to unlock the secret power hidden deep inside her, but to do so she must be instructed by an unassuming magic teacher with an agenda of his own. The set up seems familiar, the story feels traditional. But, in Witch Hat Atelier the characters are intriguing and the animation is gorgeous. The tone of the show is a gentle complement to Frieren; Beyond Journey’s End. Even the English voice acting offers a nice change of pace with a range of accents and a subtly in the delivery that draws viewers in. This, along with the stylish character design and gorgeous background art make the soft vibes and periodic peril worth watching. The idea of cozy fantasy evokes storytelling that is focused more on quiet human interactions rather than the (also present) big magic battles. Witch Hat Atelier is that kind of friendship-focused story. 

Young Coco is a little girl who lives an ordinary life with her seamstress mother in a rural medieval-like village. In Coco’s world, witches are special magic experts who are able to help the rest of humanity with their supernatural skills. In most versions of witches, wizards, and mages magic is an innate skill that must be trained in the few who possess it. But in Witch Hat Atelier, there is a very big secret about magic, it’s based on drawing specific sigils and runes and, therefore theoretically anyone can do it. To keep magic from being abused, this truth is a closely guarded secret and any untrained people who stumble upon it get their memories erased. When the charming quirky witch Qifrey comes to visit Coco’s town an unknown spirit gives her a forbidden magic book that lets her in on the secret. Since she’s always desperately dreamed of being a witch she can’t help but test out the strange drawings in the book. But disaster strikes when her spell turns her mother into stone. Although protocol demands that Coco’s memories be erased, Qifrey has pity on her and decides to take in the now orphaned girl to teach her how to become a proper witch. Coco hopes that she can learn enough magic to break the spell on her mother and Qifrey hopes he can use Coco to find the evil “brimmed cap” witch who lured the child with forbidden magic. Qifrey takes Coco to his cozy but isolated atelier where Coco meets his other young students, the aloof Agott, friendly Tetia, and uptight Richeh. They are later joined by Qifrey’s magic instructor friend Olruggio. Coco struggles to keep up with the more experienced students and the group is periodically targeted by the evil witch league known as the Brimmed Caps who have an attachment to old, forbidden magic. The repeated presence of the Brimmed Caps or elements of forbidden magic lead the local magic law enforcement to suspect that Coco may be in league with the Brimmed Caps. But as the story progresses, viewers discover that Qifrey has a secret agenda of his own.

Witch Hat Atelier is distinctive for both its art style and its focus on children. Many anime adventures involve children who are somewhere in adolescence, at least in middle school or all the way to older teens. In Witch Hat Atelier the four girls are distinctly young, grade school age, although the medieval style setting makes the usual societal reference points less clear. The children are physically small, emotionally immature, and quite vulnerable despite their fledgling magical abilities. Having four little girls without a mother figure is an interesting choice that inherently creates its own baseline tension even as the larger adventures appear. There are male adults in the primary and supporting cast but there are almost no adult women characters other than the friendly mentor Alaira (who appears very briefly early and returns in the final episode) and there is a brief interaction with a nurse when Coco gets sick. The intrigue escalates as we learn more about the girls’ teacher, the charming and kind young man Qifrey. At first glance Qifrey seems older or age-ambiguous due to his white hair and spectacles, however it is quickly clear that he is a relatively young adult. The truth about Qifrey is also an intriguing mystery. He repeatedly demonstrates genuine concern for the well-being of his four little students, especially the new and naïve Coco. However, he intentionally keeps his children separate from the main, central atelier institution, and he engages in enough questionable behavior to make viewers wonder what exactly is going on with him. 

Despite the intrigue with him, the focus of the story is on the children, and on Coco in particular. If you don’t like little kids, especially sheltered naïve kids making poor choices, this may not be the right show for you. But the pacing is thoughtful and the vibe is reminiscent of a less murder-y Frieren or like a G-rated version of The Apothecary Diaries. Coco, as the main character, is sweet, gentle, good-hearted, and brave. But she is also naïve and careless in a way that may be age appropriate but is still frustrating to watch. Each of the children fit a particular personality extreme. Agott is the grouchy, aloof, loner. Richeh is kind, but uptight and oppositionally defiant. Tetia is the friendly, sensible, diplomatic, pleaser. Coco is the wide-eyed, brave, but naive optimist. Fortunately, her naïve sweetness is balanced by her significant cleverness and her insight into the feelings of others. A major part of her appeal is her effect on the other characters. Like Tohru in Fruits Basket, Coco is a child who, despite losing everything, is able to care deeply for others and help them make meaningful improvements in their world view. Coco and the grouchy Agott have a major character arc in the first season. However, my favorite interaction is Coco’s friendship with the young apothecary boy Tartah. The two of them are adorable in their childhood vulnerability and their mutual kindness to and inspiration of each other. Tartah is a particularly great side character who manages to be calm, practical, and insightful. He quietly observes much of what is going on when things are about to fall apart. And he is also the only character who catches on to Qifrey’s suspicious behavior but, nevertheless, is measured in his approach to investigating it. 

Despite the presence of adults in the story, the adventure is primarily from the point of view of the children and the tone is that of a coming of age adventure. Unfortunately, the first season of Witch Hat Atelier ends on quite a bit of a cliff-hanger that will have the anime-only viewers hurrying to grab a copy of the manga to see how things turn out. I did and it was quite worth it.

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Highlights:

• Cozy, kid focused content
• Gorgeous animation and character design
• Balance of cuteness and tension

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Anime Review: Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Season Two

Cozy magic vibes and big battles in an entertaining but short season of comfort storytelling

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, Season Two continues the story of Frieren, a centuries old, apathetic, eternally youthful, and fiercely powerful elf mage, who begins her next adventure decades after completing a ten-year heroic quest with three teammates whose friendship she didn’t fully appreciate until they were gone. Season One offered a unique style of storytelling featuring a seemingly indifferent protagonist who gradually realizes the value of her past life lessons and her relationships. The combination of poignant growth balanced with fierce battles for survival set the stage for the next level of emotional wisdom and physical strength. This defines Season Two as Frieren’s party journeys to the dangerous Northern Lands. However, with only ten episodes, Season Two is so short that it almost feels like a side quest compared to the twenty-three segments in Season One. The decision seemed to be to adapt the next shorter portion of the manga without venturing into longer story arcs that would end the anime season on a cliff-hanger. Despite the short offering, Season Two has a meaningful tale about the value of protecting one’s community and showcases both Fern and Stark’s substantial growth in strength and emotional maturity compared to the first season. We also see Frieren’s quiet evolution from being socially indifferent to profoundly compassionate after learning the meaning of her past experiences and allowing Fern and Stark form a found family with her.

At the start of Season One, Frieren was wandering aimlessly through life after being a member of the world-famous party of heroes who defeated the oppressive demon king. The group consisted of the heroic and optimistic young leader Himmel; the quirky and kind priest Heiter; and the strong, reliable dwarf warrior Eisen. Years later she is deeply moved by Himmel and Heiter’s deaths, suddenly realizing the connections she had taken for granted. Before dying, the old priest Heiter asked Frieren to mentor Fern a magically gifted orphan girl he had sheltered. Later, the long-lived Eisen, the dwarf warrior, gave Frieren his apprentice, a strong but insecure teenaged boy named Stark. The new trio dealt with a range obstacles throughout their journey, including magical fights, political intrigue, and Fern’s intense journey to be certified as a first class mage. Season One had plenty of spectacular fight scenes but was memorable for its big and small emotional moments between the living and the dead characters. Many key moments were shared in flashback.

Season Two begins with Fern and Stark following Frieren on her journey through the Northern Lands to fulfill a spiritual connection. The emotional dynamic is more settled in Season Two. Instead of being surprised by her memories of Himmel, Frieren openly embraces her connection with him and accepts the changes in herself inspired by her interactions with him and with others whom she belatedly appreciates. Season One ended with Fern earning the rank of a rare first class mage after a fierce competition. In Season Two, on their journey north, Fern, Frieren, and Stark, reconnect with acquaintances from the mage exam and soon find themselves in a fight for their lives and for the protection of the decimated village of their stoic ally, the powerful mage Genau. Instead of creating a major shift in the tone of the story, Season Two confirms Frieren as comfort anime that offers moments of intense action but solidly focuses on character, relationship, and small acts of morality in a cruel world.

In an early episode, Fern’s party takes a job cleaning a statue of the “Hero of the South,” who Stark is surprised to learn is not Himmel. Statues of Himmel appear in random towns along their journey but the story gives a reminder that the famous heroes in history are supported by many others who are forgotten. In the middle of the season, Fern and Stark finally go on a date with mixed results. The big climax of the season is the team aiding top mages Grenau and Methode in a terrifying battle against the mega-demon Revolte. In addition to some emotional flashbacks for the very unemotional Grenau, we get to see the boys, Grenau and Stark team up against the terrifying Revolte, while Frieren, Fern, and the always calm Methode tackle a mega demon of their own.

Despite Frieren’s growing emotional awareness, she retains her pragmatism and her life-saving cynicism. This keeps the story from drifting into over-sentimentality. Similarly, Fern imitates Frieren’s calm and practical tone even when it comes to Stark to whom she is attracted. Stark remains a foil to them both since he is comfortable with being dramatic, and since he has no magic powers and must rely on his extraordinary strength and speed in their battles with demons. Stark becomes the speaker for the audience by calling out outrageous occurrences that Frieren and Fern take in stride. In Season Two, Stark also steps into instinctive and consistent bravery while maintaining his sense of humor. On the other hand, instead of being a blank canvas for others to write on, Frieren becomes the dispenser of wisdom, not just for battle, but for small human interactions with strangers in need. The episodes explore the importance of honoring unsung heroes who fight for justice, protecting the dignity of those in need, and standing with allies in tough times. In a key moment, when asked why she made a certain choice, Fern notes that it was what Frieren would have done.

Despite the very short run, Frieren Season Two delivers a strong collection of comforting, thoughtful stories, carefully balanced with big fight scenes, humor, and quiet emotions while we wait for the next big story arc to take us on a new adventure.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Highlights:

• Solid comfort storytelling
• Intense Northern Lands battles
• Strong character growth

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Book Review: A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna

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.

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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

Review: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell

A "who is the real monster?" story that dodges the complexity of its own premise

(Note: there is a fairly significant (though not plot-revealing) spoiler in this review - read on at your own risk!)

Opening confession: before reading Someone You Can Build a Nest In, I didn't rate John Wiswell's work very much. Clearly, his writing is doing a lot of things right for a lot of people, since you don't get to be Hugo and Nebula nominated without folks thinking you're great at what you do. But beyond the cute ideas, I don't find a lot in Wiswell stories to sink my teeth into. On a technical level, the prose tends towards the same basic voice regardless of the type of story being told, and on a thematic level, there's a lot of narrative "flattening" to make stories about dark, monstrous themes resolve with a relatively small number of people carving out a safe space and calling it a happy ending. Short fiction might not have much space for complex characters or worldbuilding, but it provides plenty of space for moral complexity, and I find it weird to set up complex premises only to ignore their complexity. Maybe there's something radically cosy in that that I'm just too curmudgeonly to appreciate, or maybe I'm just not picking up on complexity that everyone else sees. Who knows.

Despite not loving the author's prior work and also having a finite amount of precious reading time, I read Someone You Can Build a Nest In for two reasons. First, Hugo and Nebula nominated short fiction authors have a very non-zero chance of landing on a Best Novel ballot, and I like to read things for award purposes. Second, I really wanted this book to give me the experience that it gives people who love Wiswell's writing, because if something different is going to happen for me, it's probably going to happen at a different length, right?

Alas, it didn't happen.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In is the story of Shesheshen, an amorphous shapeshifting monster who eats people and repurposes their organs in order to survive. Shesheshen is content in her isolated, people-eating lifestyle, although she misses her mother - also a people eating shapeshifter, tragically killed by a monster hunter - and reminisces fondly about the father who she and her siblings ate from the inside out after he gestated them, as part of the people eating shapeshifter life cycle. She's also not much of a talker, and the whole book is told in her "voice": which means plenty of simple, unpolished prose. So I guess I'm not having my expectations of the author challenged on that front!

Anyway, when Shesheshen is rudely awoken from hibernation by some monster hunters (led by a posh asshole, so you know you're supposed to root for the people eating monster and not the hunters trying to put an end to all the people eating), it puts her out of her regular people eating schedule and she has no choice but to go into town to find some people to eat immediately (target: another posh and kinda sleazy asshole, also fine to root against). When that doesn't work, she falls off a cliff and is tended to a kind, fat, practical young woman called Homily, who is hunting monsters in the ravine. Shesheshen is delayed from eating Homily for long enough to fall in love with her, Homily is selectively dense enough not to realise the person who survived a fall off a cliff and has no recognisable human organ structures might actually be a monster, and thus begins a beautiful relationship.

Complicating factor number one in Homily and Shesheshen's relationship: for Shesheshen, "falling in love" coincides with getting a strong urge to lay eggs in Homily and have them eat her from the inside out. For me, this aspect of the story actually delivered what I wanted from it to a large extent, albeit without a huge emphasis on the actual wanting to build a nest in her girlfriend bit (you'd have thought... but no). I'd really like to read more stories where "alien" biological urges are things that sentient creatures can exert control and choice over, and while things work out rather conveniently in terms of Shesheshen eradicating those urges, she goes through an interesting process to re-examine what she assumed being in love with someone would look like versus what she actually wants with, and from, Homily. That she has to do this without guidance from a parental figure is both thematically relevant and also kind of interesting, and it makes Shesheshen's convenient discoveries about herself less annoying - maybe she's not the first people eating shapeshifter to do certain things, but she's never had any fellow shapeshifters to learn from. It's heavily implied, though not literally stated, that Homily is asexual ("enby" is a word in people's vocabulary in this queernorm setting, so it's perhaps a bit odd that "ace" isn't, but I digress) so Shesheshen doesn't have any human sexual preferences to figure out how she fits with, aside from an easily discovered mutual enjoyment of cuddling. Good for them, and a win for alien monster protagonist portrayal.

Complicating factor number two is, unfortunately, where things go off the rails. See, Homily isn't just some random monster hunter hunting some random offscreen monster: she's the daughter of the land's war hero leader, and her mother and siblings (one of whom was the posh asshole from earlier! Who already got eaten, oops) are back from the exile which Shesheshen's mother imposed on them by "cursing" the family if they stayed. Homily's family are abusive towards her, and Homily has adapted to this abuse by trying to make herself as "useful" as possible in any given situation, even when it hurts her to do so. Now that Shesheshen has avoided detection as a people eating shapeshifter, she gets roped into the expedition to hunt herself, and to try and help Homily with a toxic family reunion, while also throwing the monster hunting off her own scent.

To fully contextualise why I hated this plot, I have to give that one significant spoiler mentioned above: none of Homily's immediate family survive this book. That means her mother, her adult younger sister Epithet, and her child sister Ode (and her posh asshole brother, but he's gone and we've already mostly forgotten about him, except when Shesheshen uses his teeth to smile at her girlfriend) all meet their ends in ways that are apparently intended to provide context or even catharsis about the familial abuse. This is some morally grey shit right here, especially since one sister was a child eight years younger than Homily while most of her part in the abuse was taking place, and the other is still an actual child. That's not to say that children can't cause real physical and emotional damage to their siblings, even much older ones, but it's surely an open question to what extent the culpability lies with the child and not with the adults who had a duty of care to both siblings? Someone You Can Build A Nest In doesn't seem to care about that question. Instead, we get "straightforward" lessons, in 21st century therapist vocabulary, about how terrible abuse is, and therefore aren't abusers the real monsters here? If the text is nudging us towards answers more sophisticated than "yes", it's laying down clues too subtle for my reading skills, so I'm left assuming that "yes" is the desired answer, and I don't like it.

Ode's death is particularly egregious: having been a bratty bit of comic relief in the narrative, her death is mourned on page by nobody except her mother, whose grief is called out as toxic and wrong. Meanwhile, Homily learns the valuable life lesson that she didn't have to risk her own life trying to save her sister, she's still a good person and nobody should judge her for not trying a bit harder to rescue a child from a grim death. I'm glad we got that lesson sorted out and now you don't have to have any complicated feelings about your role in that situation, Homily! While the other family deaths are treated with a bit more weight, the whole familial comeuppance sits poorly, particularly because it was an authorial choice to make two of Homily's most prominent abusive family members children, set up what should have been a complicated moral situation, and then just... sidestep that complexity, because the story you want to tell is about how abusers are the real monsters, and not the people eating girlfriend. Also relevant: Shesheshen has conveniently gone the whole story without eating anyone who hadn't broken the law or been a posh asshole first, because having to grapple with the ethics of eating people to live is apparently also beyond this story's interests. Textual moral greyness averted again!

So no, I do not get anything cathartic or heartwarming out of Shesheshen and Homily's story. To find those things would require me to narrow down my curiosity and my empathy to the tiny number of characters that the story wants me to believe are worthy of it, and it did not succeed in convincing me of its judgements (was it the people eating? maybe...). In different hands, the messiness inherent in this story could have been kind of amazing. While reading, I drew comparisons to The Book Eaters, which also features obligate people eating and is fully aware of how bleak and antithetical to a heartwarming familial ending that diet is, even as it tries to bring that ending about. I also thought about Light From Uncommon Stars, which portrays an escape from abuse and into the loving orbit of an objectively fucked up person who needs to be convinced not to sacrifice the protagonist to the devil, and which tells that story in a way which acknowledges both the love and the irredeemable mess. But unless I'm missing something huge, that's not the story Wiswell wanted to tell, so I'm left with another question: is there a version of this kind of story, where all we are meant to care about is the comfort of the main characters regardless of what they do to others, that is uncomplicatedly cosy and heartwarming? I don't know, but I'm going to go back to seeking out the messy, fucked up monster stories, and the radical empathy they often demand, rather than putting myself through this sort of book too often.

Review: Can't Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne

 A low-stakes, cosy fantasy that unfortunately fails to pull together the magic it needs to really make the story sing.

A while ago, Elizabeth reviewed Travis Baldree's hit novel Legends and Lattes, talking about what works (and doesn't) in making it such a cosy fantasy story. I predominantly agree with her assessment, but would like to add that, at least for me, there was something in there, some little spark of magic that made me get why this got so big, why people loved it so much. Yeah, it was flawed, especially with regard to the clichés and lack of depth of character backstory, but something about it did just... click.

Of course, when you have something so wildly successful, there are going to be other stories hot on its heels - there are plenty floating around at the moment, some of which so clearly play by play copies that it's hard not to laugh - but one that seems to have caught some buzz of its own is Can't Spell Treason Without Tea, and indie published novel by Rebecca Thorne. It's not quite got the intense upswell of tiktok love that Baldree got, but it's definitely doing the rounds as another great example of cosy fantasy, without seeming like an exact duplicate.

Can't Spell Treason Without Tea follows Reyna - a royal guard to a frankly horrendous queen - and her girlfriend Kianthe - the leader of the mages of the neighbouring kingdom - in their long-hoped-for escape from both of their lives by running away from their responsibilities and setting up a cafe-cum-bookshop-cum-library together in a little town on the edge of nowhere. They need to escape the strands of their old lives, make friends, and figure out how to do this new thing that has been in neither of their skillsets up until now, and see if their thus-far-long-distance relationship can stand up to living, working and simply being together. So much the similar, you might think.

Unfortunately, Thorne does not have that little spark of magic to make it all hang together.

And it's interesting to see this, because so many of the key ingredients in the two stories are the same: sapphic love interests, the desire to open a little shop in somewhere far away, a focus on the baked goods/food in general, the kindness to be found in community, escaping the roles we play in the familiar stories, found family, all that good stuff. But what you get out of the story at the end is very different.

I think one of the key issues in Thorne's work is actually quite simple - we come into the story with the romantic relationship already in place, and nothing about that relationship changes in the course of the book. And I so wanted to like that about it. I wanted to be happy to see a stable relationship in place, and have the story not be about falling in love, but simply being in love and responding to the plot together, as a couple. There are few enough examples of this dynamic in good stories, and it's something I really treasure when it's done well, because well... once they've fallen in love, does that have to be the end of the story? It's not how it is for most people. It's not how it feels like it ought to be. And yet... here... it just doesn't work. I found myself wishing for that same old new relationship story instead because then there would feel like some sort of stake, or change, or tension or... something. Their relationship is nice, but no more than nice, and I wanted it to have a substance it was lacking - a substance that it being the beginning of a relationship would at least paper over with drama.

But it's more than that - not only does the relationship not really change, we also never get the relationship really showcased in how they react jointly to issues. We don't see Reyna and Kianthe strongly pulling together in the face of whatever drama is thrown their way. What we mainly see is them taking turns on whose go it is to be stressed out by something the other person has done. And while that can be incredibly realistic in terms of actual relationship dynamics... by the time we've had the third go around of it in the story, it feels somewhat dull. We know how it's going to play out, and then it does, and it just feels... pointless.

But I don't think this is an inherent flaw with this style of story. I think you can have a good, stable relationship at the heart of a good story, where the actual relationship doesn't change all that much through the course of the story. But it isn't this one.

Some of that is unfortunately also due to the story around it - Thorne has not set things up well to make this strong relationship the core of a strong narrative, simply because so much of what goes on around it is, to be blunt, a bit of a mess. And again, it would be easy to critique this as inherent to the low-stakes that come part and parcel with a lot of cosy fantasy, but I think that would be a mistake. There's actually quite a lot of stakes happening throughout the story here - dragon attacks are nothing if not dramatic - but the prose, the tone and the general emotion of Thorne's writing do a lot of work to downplay them in a frankly strange way. It's a rare story that makes a near death experience feel a bit bland, but this one does it. Kudos, I guess? What the problem mostly comes down to is the general vibe the whole story has of being meandering - there's not coherent plot drive at any point that makes it feel like a joined up, moving story on an actual track towards something. It's just some things that happen. And that lack of cohesion underpins everything that happens, robbing it of the drama or emotion it might have because it doesn't fit into any sort of greater pattern, it just... is.

Again, to compare it to Legends and Lattes, for all that the two are superficially similar in their low stakes, what Baldree does do is give a constant sense that we are building towards something. Viv has her end goal of her coffee shop and all the stuff that happens in the story either works towards her achieving it, is a problem sent that might prevent her achieving it, or is a benefit that comes from the process of trying to achieve it. It all ties together and feels purposeful, tight and has movement, even when the actual events that happen are incredibly small scale, like the bard wanting to come in and play to her patrons.

Can't Spell Treason Without Tea however has cast its net too broad; there are wider bits and bobs that pop up throughout the story that don't really tie back into that central plot core of the café/bookshop dream, and they just serve to rob it of the drive it would need to keep the lower stakes parts of the plot interesting. Thorne is just too interested in too many things. And many of them are interesting things! I really liked the subplot about the two competing political powers from the two countries wanting to be in charge of this nowhere town on the border, and their having to work together to solve a dragon problem. But it felt like a subplot that came from - or frankly was the whole of - another story altogether, and just pulled us away from what CSTWT could have been on its own. 

And we have enough parts like this that we end up with really quite a long-feeling book, for all its 388 pages. Somehow, it feels bloated and stagnant through much of the middle part, without ever even being long enough to have much of a middle part in the first place.

I do wonder if this is a risk inherent with cosy fantasy as a genre. Obviously it can be done well and right - I think both Legends and Lattes and The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches have something to recommend them as fun, light, enjoyable reads - but I think when you strip out higher stakes drama, you really have to be conscious of the craft of what's left to make sure it holds together as a story, with a pace people want to read. The pace doesn't have to be fast - not all stories need to be high-speed adventure romps - but there needs to be something that keeps pushing you on to read, to want to find out what happens next, or how, or just to know that it's all happy in the end. There needs to be a feeling of purpose, even at the lowest level, somewhere, that holds it all together as a "story", not a catalogue of some events that happened to some people, and the lower the stakes you strive for, the higher the risk of this failure state becomes. Maybe you fix it by adding a little bit of stakes, as a treat. Maybe you fix it with making the characters incredibly compelling, or their development particularly interesting. Maybe you put in a smidgen of a mystery. Or maybe you just hone everything to a perfect, crisp point so even the lowest of low stakes still feel considered and deliberate. There are many ways to make it work. But in the same way as the failure state of hard sf can sometimes be "textbook", I think there are enough cautionary examples out there now that we can see the failure state of cosy fantasy is just... some things what happened. And that is, to an extent, what has happened with Can't Spell Treason Without Tea.

Fundamentally, it's such a shame, because there's so much in here that could, without a lot of change, have been a fun, light, low stakes bit of fun. It's so close to getting it right. But it hasn't, and given its similarity, what that means is it ends up feeling like just another of those rip-offs, attempting to snag some of the glory from Legends and Lattes' success, when in many ways, it could so easily have been its own, albeit similar, self.

And thus I would sadly say, if you have read Legends and Lattes, don't read this, because it's just... not as good. And if you haven't read Legends and Lattes... well, just read that instead if you want something in this mode, because it does it a whole lot more competently.

--

The Math

Highlights: some amusing subplots with quite funny characters, cosy vibes

Nerd coefficient: 4/10

Reference:  Rebecca Thorne, Can't Spell Treason Without Tea [Rebecca Thorne, 2022]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Microreview: Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

An attempt at a cosy fantasy historical romance whose lack of attention to detail manages to undercut any charm it pulls together.

We’ll get to the more substantive critique in a minute, but I want to start off with something that will be entirely irrelevant to most readers, but intensely annoying for a few. The protagonist is a female scholar – a professor, in fact – in Cambridge in 1909. Cambridge did not begin to award women degrees until 1948. When they did try to change the rules, for instance in 1921, there were riots. It was not an uncontroversial situation.

Based on some other choices in the book (for instance, it is set in a queernorm universe), I am reasonably sure Fawcett has intended this as a deliberate choice, making the world of 1909 just… a better place than it really was, to give herself the space to write the story she wants to write, without having to put in a load of homophobia and misogyny. And while this is certainly an approach one might take, it's not one that sits entirely well with me, not only here, but in many other historical works, as well as steampunk and adjacent genres. There’s an episode of Star Trek: DS9 (S7E15) in which Sisko, asked as a black man to play dress-up in a sanitised version of 1960s Las Vegas, sums it up nicely: "We cannot ignore the truth about the past.". While he changes his mind by the end of the episode, I think the validity of his initial concerns remains - by writing this nicer, cleaner, happier version of the past, are we erasing the truth of it? I think by writing that version of the past in which everyone gets to be happy, as they could not in truth, you erase the very real problems, and the struggles of the people who lived them, just to enjoy an aesthetic. And here, where the struggles are something we can pinpoint easily to dates and specifics, it's hard to ignore that discrepency.

I know other people have a different take on this, and the argument that the people who were excluded at the time can enjoy reclaiming what they ought to have had access to in the first place is a perfectly reasonable one… just not one that works for me. It niggles, in the process of reading.

It doesn't help, then, that Fawcett has managed to make some factual errors about her protagonist's university alongside all of this:

- I’m reasonably sure the author uses “professor” in the American sense, not the British one, despite the academics in the book being English and Irish
- The references to the geography of Cambridge and Cambridgeshire never evoke anything real in them, and at times, mention things which, while technically possible, are rather implausible (forests and hills and other things when the Cambridge area is almost entirely fenland)
- The protagonist has a BSc, when everyone who graduates from Cambridge gets a BA (if it's a B-anything)
- The university seems to have a modern US tenure track system, rather than anything resembling a historical English setting, or even modern Cambridge
- Several characters mention "quads" and "quadrangles". These aren't a thing in Cambridge at all.
- Despite mentioning Cambridge approximately one gazillion times (to the point where it does become a little annoying to the reader, in fact) throughout the course of the novel… the author never once mentions a Cambridge college.

That last point may seem trivial, and in fact it took me a while to notice when reading, beyond a vague sense of something being deeply off, but once I did realise, it was impossible to ignore. It is one of the defining features of Cambridge (and Oxford), and anyone there, or who once was there, will have a collegiate affiliation that will, in some ways, be a significant part of how they identify themselves, especially amongst other Cambridge people. It's a default of self-presentation. So to go through a whole novel about a character who has such fond and constant feelings about Cambridge, and for her to never mention her own college, nor her friend/rival/person’s college, or even if they’re at the same one, is deeply bizarre, and really throws off immersion in the story once noticed.

Of course, none of this matters to most readers. It is, for the most part, irrelevant. But once you know, once you notice, it belies a rather deep absence of research on an even basic level which is somewhat offputting for a novel in a historical setting.

There are also some other issues outside of this, if historical accuracy isn't something that bothers you.

The story follows Professor Emily Wilde, a dryadologist, on fieldwork out in Ljosland (which appears to be a fake Scandi island, using the name of a real town in Norway) to uncover details of a particular type of faery for her great work – the first real encyclopaedia of all faeries. While out there, she is, to her disgruntlement, joined by her annoyingly charming and handsome friend and academic rival, Wendell Bambleby.

Yes, you read that right, Wendell Bambleby. No, I never got over it. I’m still not over it. Moreover, Wendell Bambleby, despite having what I can only consider a parodically English name, is actually Irish. There is precisely zero acknowledgement at any point in the text that there might, maybe, just slightly, be some Anglo-Irish tensions in 1909.

Together, they investigate the mysterious local faeries, as well as getting drawn into the faery-related problems experienced by the villagers. In something that may sound like a spoiler but absolutely isn't one - indeed, it is blindingly obvious even from the cover blurb of the book - they also fall in love.

All of this is... fine. It’s not stunningly original or anything, but it could still be some fun fluff done well.

Alas, it was not.

The story is written as, for the most part, diary entries by Emily… which is fair enough at the start, but as events go a bit pear-shaped, it begins to strain credulity somewhat that she/whoever would be writing them when the entries claim to be from. The prose style also strays very quickly away from even vaguely plausibly her writing a diary to something that feels much closer to a more normal 1st person narration voice. I would, quite frequently, forget it was a diary format until I hit a new chapter heading, which has the date at the top of it to remind you. This feels something of a shame. Interesting formats or framing devices can be really great, but it feels like if you’re doing one, you should actually embrace it in order to get it to that greatness. Halfway houses tend to feel a little haphazard.

This then highlights how shallowly the characters feel drawn. If the diary format had been fully realised, this could quite easily be handwaved away as being stuck inside Emily's head and only getting her view. But it isn’t, and quite frankly, even she, our first person narrator telling us her actual thoughts, feels distant and hard to grasp. She just lacks substance. Of course the side characters never stood a chance.

The plot, too, is a bit thin on the ground. Events hang together by tenuous threads, often of motivation that we simply do not see spelled out in how people act. They behave unexpectedly, and things just sort of happen.

And then… well there’s the whole premise really. Emily is a scholar in 1909 doing fieldwork. One of the few bits of genuine historical accuracy that remains in the book is the entitlement obvious in Emily’s attitude towards the people who form the basis of her study. I am not certain if this is deliberate, on the author’s part. Emily Wilde goes in, despite claiming to have done extensive fieldwork before, and proceeds to just assume the world always follows the rules she knows at home, and being utterly baffled that other people in other cultures… have different mores. And even when she notices that she’s offended someone, someone she needs on her side to get her work done, she doesn’t ask what it is she’s done, not even the friendly young boy who seems to think she’s great for reasons unclear to me. It is only when Wendell turns up to be charming at everyone/thing and points out to her that people are people that she manages to make friends. Which is not to say Wendell is perfect – he’s just as bad as her, except that he notices it, and is willing to try to get his way by being charming and manipulative, rather than obtuse. That might actually be worse. And while, yes, this feels like absolutely the sort of attitude an English scholar in 1909 would have, why, when you’re doing queernorm, gender equalitarian past, did you have to leave that in? Why am I meant to be sympathetic to someone who is trampling all over other cultures like that? Because it feels a difficult thing, especially at the start, to sympathise with her while watching her behaviour. And it’s a book that really does need that sympathy to get you through.

The world-building is also a little odd. We’re in an imagined Scandi island, but the protagonist has come from a real place. But she’s also done research in a made-up southern European country. It feels like the world-building has been done very much on the fly, and, to be blunt, just to get around having to do any research for points where the author didn’t feel confident flying blind. To take a book doing something quite similar, if Fawcett had followed the same approach as Marie Brennan in writing the Lady Trent books, making up a fake country (that we all know is totally England), giving it a made up name and a made up university, however obvious the analogy to real world places, it would have given everything just that bit of plausible deniability necessary to suspend disbelief. It wouldn't have to be accurate then - it's made-up. But once you make choices that encompass real world places and events, you have to at least get it a little bit right. Make it so people don’t notice right from the off. But this half-in, half-out approach doesn’t manage to give you the wins of either side, and leaves it all feeling an unplanned mess, rather than a coherent, cohesive, thought-out whole.

That being said, there are some good points. For all its lack of commitment to the framing device, the writing is very easy to get into, and it’s a very fast, pacy read that would be easy enough to get through in a single day. Despite the characters, and some of the events, the romance part manages to be somewhat compelling. Mostly, this is because Wendell is, at times, very funny. You can see why someone would both like and want to smack him, in those moments where he gets some actual character development. But it is really hard to stack all this up against the litany of various gripes that are evident throughout.

I don’t hate it. It’s not that bad. It’s just also… not very good. And it’s trying to do the sort of cosy, romantic fantasy that is currently enjoying a surge of popularity, so it’s not even as though it deserves points for originality. There are simply plenty of other books out there willing to provide cosy historical fantasy romances, and many of those just do a better job of it.

--

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 5/10

Bonuses: +1 for easy, pacy reading

Penalties: -1 constant historical inaccuracy and strange world-building choices that make it hard to ignore the flaws, -1 lack of commitment to framing device

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10

Reference:  Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries [Little Brown Book Group, 2022]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Microreview [book]: Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree

A fun and food-focused comfort read.

As Roseanna mentioned last month, cosy fantasy is becoming increasingly prevalent. Legends and Lattes is a perfect demonstration of the subgenre's popularity. First self-published in February 2022, it was so successful that Tor quickly picked it up and is rereleasing it this month -- a fast turnaround for a notoriously slow industry.

The story focuses on Viv, an orc adventurer ready for retirement. Her injuries are racking up (her lower back has particularly been playing up), she's tired of her coworkers (or one of them, anyway), and she has a new dream: to open a coffee shop. So, she comes to Thune, finds a decrepit hostelry just off the main street and gets to work. But renovating and running a coffee shop is a big job, and Viv can't do it on her own.

Unsurprisingly then (it's a cosy fantasy, after all), this is a book about found family. Viv slowly collects the people she needs to see her dream become a reality. She starts with Cal, a builder and craftsman who Viv recruits to help with the renovations. Being a hob, he's not exactly overrun with work, but he is well established and good at what he does. His surprised response to Viv's trust in him was a little bittersweet. In return, he provides Viv with a good foundation and her first friend in Thune.

Next is Tandri, a succubus who answers Viv's advertisement for an assistant on the very day it is posted. Practical, enthusiastic and whip-smart, Tandri gives the café her all from the get-go, constantly coming up with new ideas to bring in customers and help things run more smoothly. In Tandri, Viv finds not only an assistant but a business partner and maybe something more.

 The rattkin Thimble is already a regular at the café when Viv starts looking for a baker. Like Cal, he's not much of a talker, but is keen to come on board if part of his wages include a steady supply of coffee. His delectable creations put Viv's café on the map... and will have you drooling as you read.

As may be obvious, this is very much a book centred around its characters. That said, we're not offered much in the way of backstory for them. It is enough to know that they are outsiders, for the most part. Because this is also a book about defying the expectations of society. As an orc, Viv is used to people watching her with distrust and expecting her to cause trouble or respond with violence. They don't expect her to become a neighbour or to serve food. Likewise, only fans of Ratatouille expect a ratkin to be a genius baker. Succubi like Tandri are supposed to exude sexuality, not to have a head for thaumaturgy.

Speaking of which, we get a modicum more backstory from Tandri to set the stage for a plotline involving a stalker. On the whole, I found this thread was pretty well handled. It was tame enough on the page not to interfere with the cosy vibe, but persistent enough for it to feel like a threat.

Balancing this characterisation of Tandri as not being defined by her sexuality with her romantic interest in Viv was also well handled. While it was a shade understated for my taste, it suited the story being told and is unlikely to send the romance adverse screaming in the other direction.

However, this general inversion of expectations doesn't always work. One place it felt a bit squishy was regarding the identity of the city's crime boss. I won't spoil that here; the reveal was fun and I rather enjoyed it. However, Viv's eventual arrangement with the Madrigal handwaves the fact that they remain a crime boss and by inference are causing harm to other parts of the community -- the same community that so heartwarmingly rallies around Viv when disaster does eventually strike.

The ending is perhaps a bit cliché, being very "the real treasure is the friends we made along the way," but that's to be expected of a cosy fantasy and works well in this context. Similarly, the beginning is a bit slow, being filled with details about the renovations and how to make coffee. That's not going to work for everyone, but does help set up a slice-of-life vibe that is part and parcel of the subgenre. 

This is billed as a high fantasy with low stakes. While it is unquestionably high fantasy, I'm not entirely sure I can agree that it's low stakes. It's true that the world or even the city isn't facing peril, but what can be higher stakes than the death of someone's dream?

So, if  you're looking for a fun and somewhat food-focused comfort read (and who isn't, these days?) Legends and Lattes may be just the treat you need.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for the excellent cosy vibes, +1 for Thimble's delicious Midnight Crescents

Penalties: - 1 for the Madrigal's cognitive dissonance

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

POSTED BY: Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a writer, binge reader, tabletop gamer & tea addict. @elizabeth_fitz

References

Baldree, Travis. Legends and Lattes [Tor Books, 2022]

Microreview[Novel]: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna

 An extremely cosy novel of found family, romance and magic, that may just be slightly too nice for its own good.

Cosy fantasy seems to be more and more prevalent recently - and with good reason. When times are stressful, turning to a book where you know things are all going to turn out fine is a very reasonable reaction to have. Romance is a perfect vector for that kind of comfort, and when paired with a nice fantasy, all the better. But there's a risk with that kind of narrative too, where the inevitability of the happy ending becomes so overpowering that it saps even the slightest tension and suspense from the story, leaving you bored. There needs to be at least mild peril, some stakes, for the happy ending to really have the full effect.

The problem is, I'm not sure if The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches quite had enough stakes to pull off what it was trying to do.

Which is a shame, because a lot of the trappings around the core story were done really well.

We follow Mika Moon, a 30 year old British witch living a somewhat lonely life. Witches in her world are necessarily solitary creatures, all orphaned, and never joining together in communities, as meeting up in groups brings with it a great deal of danger. She sees her fellow British witches irregularly, in remote locations, for a brief and unsatisfactory secret meetings organised by their very strict and risk-averse leader. She has to move around a lot so no one realises what she is. But she has her one outlet - making TikTok videos in which she "pretends" to be a witch, as the closest way she feels she can get to being her true self in public, and even this is a cause of censure from her elders.

But one day, someone finds her on TikTok, seemingly having realised what she really is, and comes to her with an intriguing offer to come to a remote house in Norfolk to teach three very young witches how to use their powers. Drawn in by the semblance of a true family she finds there, as well as the determination to protect the girls, she's unable to resist, even once she finds out there's a very imminent need for her tuition.

And of course, there's a handsome but grumpy librarian who is very protective of the children and wary of strangers at the house too. We can all see where that goes.

Mika is simultaneously a great character, a young woman of colour whose upbringing in an empty house, by a revolving cast of nannies hired by an emotionally distant white woman, has left her not only desperate for some sort of affection, but cut off from her heritage. She knows almost nothing about where she came from and who she is, and Primrose, her adoptive mother, is not exactly forthcoming with information. But Mika is surprisingly cheerful about the whole situation. She sees her problems but isn't overcome by them most of the time, and tries to live a positive life despite the hand she's been dealt. She's also a delightfully realistic thirty year old, dealing with a lot of very modern stresses of being a single adult at 30 without a proper support system. There's also a strand of extremely self-aware humour in the way she talks about herself within the narrative, reflecting on the whimsy of her own name, for instance, which undercuts the silliness of it that might result in rolled eyes from the reader.

On the flip side, she's so trusting, so good, that she seems sometimes impossible. She bounces back, refuses to become bogged down by her troubles to such a degree that it feels hard to relate to her. And there's only so much the self-awareness can do to undercut the whimsy. Mika's dream of opening a witchy shop and solving everyone's problems with really good tea sometimes tests that limit.

The other characters have similar problems as well - the little girls are improbably and constantly nice to one another (with one brief exception later in the book), the old married gay couple are impossibly wholesome and the housekeeper is... well she's mostly absent from the story but when she's there, lovely. It's a sweetness that is definitely cosy, but can border on the saccharine.

If you stopped reading it at about 60%, I think that would be a fair assessment of the book. However, for the last portion, things shift a little, the stakes get more real, and some of the ridiculous, even artificial-feeling parameters of the early story are revealed to be not exactly what they seemed. The central problem of the story becomes both more complex and more plausible, and the relationships more fraught because of what Mika learns about the people she has come to help out of the goodness of her heart. Things we learned early on are refocused, and it becomes a much tighter seeming bit of world building than we first assumed it was.

The pace also picks up a bit, in contrast to the somewhat slice of life, dreamy tone of the early section, in which pretty much everything goes smoothly and no one has all that much to worry about.

And this is great, because the end part of the story is really very well done, but because it has that noticeably tone-shift, and that massive disjoint, it does also risk the reader looking back less favourably on what came before. You can see what building work has been done there, and why it was necessary as scene-setting for what we get at the end... but it is really quite jarring, too.

And then there's the relationship with Jamie. It is absolutely, from the first mention of him in the story, inevitable-feeling. There is simply no doubt. But for the first 60%, we get a slow-burn, will-they-won't-they that borders on infuriating. In-text, there's only the most minimal, most chaste of hints that romance may be coming between them, even while, metatextually, it is incredibly, face-slappingly obvious. And then again, we flip a switch in the last 40%, and their relationship takes a turn to both the sexual and the fraught, and they become a pair of very real, emotionally messed up 30-somethings, approaching each other in a very messed up but compelling way. And a pair of absolute, massive nerds.

And the resolution of the ending is genuinely excellent. It's not as simple or as clean as the early book would imply. It ties up threads we didn't even realise were loose, leaves things in a great place and with optimism but realism about what comes next for everyone involved. It's not a perfect happiness, but it's one where a lot of people have learned, or grown, or changed, and maybe realised their previous mess-ups and started the work of fixing them, and it is all the more satisfying for that. 

But we have to reckon with the early part of the story, and what it took to get to that end. Does it balance out the oversweetness of the start by the much more complex ending? It depends. If this is a book read for comfort on a bad day, needing happy endings and good people, then yes, it probably does. But you do need to be in that headspace, to be willing to forgive a little more cosy than credulity can necessarily bear. Ultimately, I think it's worth forgiving, as both the ending and the romance are genuinely satisfying... but you're probably not going to forget, even so.

--

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 genuinely satisfying and complex ending

Penalties: -1 somewhat sickly sweet start to the story that the ending doesn't wholly overcome

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws

Reference: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches Sangu Mandanna [Hodder and Stoughton, 2022]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea