The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna

Rating: 0.5/5 stars

According to my library’s ebook copy, this book is 332 pages long. According to me, not a single thing happens whatsoever in all 332 pages. Not a single thing worth noting or remembering or telling your friends about so they can rush out and get their own copy. Nothing. After the first two chapters, I feared that it may be impossible to wring any kind of review out of the dry pages of this novel. However, my beloved fellow Bastard Reviewer Peachy G Harrison is filled with despair when the rest of us don’t promptly write reviews, so here I am.

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches follows Mika Moon, an Indian-born, British-raised witch. Witches must keep their abilities secret from society and remain isolated from other witches, since a concentration of witches in the same place can lead to loss of control over magic. Mika, desperate for an outlet to use her magic, posts videos online where she “pretends” to be a witch. This leads to a job offer from the inhabitants of Nowhere House, who want Mika to live with them and tutor three young witches in magic before the arrival of the homeowner’s solicitor, who would not react well to the discovery that his client’s adopted daughters are witches.

As usual, I have chosen three points to discuss: the lack of conflict, the characters/representation, and the romance. There will not be as many spoilers in this review as my other ones. I have marked the sections that contain them for easy skipping.

LACK OF CONFLICT

Every so often Sangu Mandanna would remember that there is supposed to be a conflict, throw in a clunky and contrived source of tension, immediately resolve it, then move on to the next Cardboard Romance TherapySpeak Found Family Kids Say The Darnedest Things moment.

For example, Mika learns that, like herself, the three girls were each plucked from their homes as orphaned babies by a white British woman, then brought to their current home. This should be a huge source of tension: even if it is for the sake of ‘protecting witches’ and ‘giving the girls a home,’ the idea of white British women taking young girls of colour away from their communities to be raised among mostly white people is deeply uncomfortable. Instead, it says that “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.” Apparently the time to have that particular conversation is never, because it is never addressed after this.

This happens again when Mika talks to Primrose (the white British woman who raised her) over tea and we receive a ton of exposition about the witchfinder general, an old witch spell that went awry and became a curse, and Mika’s mother and grandmother. None of these things come up again in any meaningful way, despite being full of interest and possibility. Witch hunts! Ancient curses and spells! Powerful witches in India! Why mention these at all if it won’t be given more than half a page’s consideration?

(Minor spoilers—skip to next bolded section)

The most frustrating instance of a conflict that doesn’t follow through is the climactic scene. The entire point of Mika tutoring the girls at Nowhere House is so they won’t accidentally reveal their magic to the solicitor. The solicitor’s visit should be fraught with peril and mishaps. Instead, Mika and Jamie arrive at the house AFTER the girls have already tried and failed to solve the situation themselves. Mika quickly comes up with a predictable solution and convinces everyone involved to cooperate, and ta-da! The danger is gone, but we hardly got to see anything interesting at all!

(Minor spoilers ended)

The only consistent conflict is Mika’s fears over not belonging anywhere and not receiving love and trust. This, however, is beaten over the reader’s head so much that it’s less a source of conflict and more a PSA on Finding Love And Family. After a point, it starts to get downright ridiculous: there is a “betrayal” of sorts in the third act of the book, which upsets Mika because it shows that the inhabitants of Nowhere House don’t “trust” her, so their affection for her must not be real. This is an absurd line of thought for someone who is a PAID EMPLOYEE and has only been so for THREE MONTHS. A lot of jobs don’t even take you off probation after three months! If the family’s affection is supposedly “fake” then can’t the same argument be made for Mika’s affection, since she is PAID to tutor the girls and live in the house with the rest of the family? It would take much stronger writing than this to account for these facts and still make Mika’s disjointed logic believable.

HASHTAG REPRESENTATION

The inhabitants of Nowhere House consist of: Rosetta, the oldest child, who is black; Terracotta, the middle child, who is Vietnamese; Altamira, the youngest child, who is Palestinian; Lucie, the housekeeper, who is white British; Jamie, the librarian, who is white and Irish; Ken, the caretaker, who is Japanese; and Ian, a white British retired actor who is Ken’s husband and who wears a rainbow scarf and who certainly is not at all a fictional version of the very real gay white British actor named Ian McKellan who famously wore a rainbow scarf. The homeowner is Lillian, a white British woman who spends most of her time abroad for work.

On the surface, this variety looks great. The problem is that the author didn’t seem to think deeply about how these various characters experience the world beyond surface-level “the black girl has curls/coils” or “the gay couple could not get legally married for a long time.”

For example, Rosetta is described as having “thick coils of dark hair pulled back into a ponytail” in her introduction, then later on as having a “halo of thick, beautiful curls around her face.” This latter hairstyle comes after she “had insisted on washing her hair this morning and had sat patiently for an hour while Ken had dried, untangled, combed, and styled it.” Setting aside the question of where Ken even learned to do black hair (Rosetta has been living at Nowhere House for years, so let’s say he learned it especially for her), this timeframe is INCREDIBLY swift work for Rosetta’s hair texture. At no point do any of the characters consider taking her to a black hairdresser so an expert can look after her hair and so she can actually, you know, see other people like her. In fact, the only time the book mentions Rosetta meeting another black person is in the last chapter.

This is a problem with the other two girls as well: never meeting anyone like them. All three girls are totally divorced from their home cultures, and it never occurs to any of the characters to incorporate the girls’ home cultures into their lives or help them find people from their own communities—which is troubling when you remember that, other than Ken, all of the girls’ guardians are white.

The depiction of the gay characters is questionable as well. Ian represents what I assume is supposed to be the reader stand-in: he wants Mika and Jamie to get together and orchestrates situations to encourage them. This manifests some clunky and amateur dialogue about attraction, dating, and sex, as well as the extremely disturbing habit of locking Jamie in with women who work at the house. This habit is referenced twice in the book—once with a previous employee of the house, and once with Mika—and both times it is treated as a mildly annoying and eccentric practice, and not, you know, workplace harassment.

CHECKLIST ROMANCE

There are romances structured around a story, and there are stories structured around a romance. The former is good. The latter…not so much. If you’re writing ONLY a romance then it’s fine, but the problem is that this book has witches and magic and orphaned children who might be torn from their loving adoptive home. It makes no sense for the plot (even one as flimsy as this one) to grind to a halt because Mika needs to have another flavourless therapyspeak conversation with Jamie.

(Minor spoilers—skip to next bolded section)

For example: Mika, Ian, and Jamie take Rosetta into town to visit a bookshop. Jamie goes off on a mysterious errand. Mika leaves Ian with Rosetta, goes to find Jamie, and has a Netflix Original Show Dialogue conversation with him. They return to the bookshop to learn that Rosetta “lost her temper” during a conversation with some other children, lost control of her magic, created a “small cyclone” that destroyed several books, and had to do some quick thinking along with Ian to cover up this use of magic in front of the general public.

The conversation that Mika and Jamie have does contain some facts relevant to later events, but did it have to happen THEN, at the expense of the reader missing a potentially very cool scene? Do I want to read Mika talking to and flirting with this bland white boy when I could be reading a young witch creating a magical cyclone during her adventure in town (which is, by the way, the first time that she has left home in years)?

(Minor spoilers ended)

All of Mika and Jamie’s scenes are what I call ‘checklist romance’—romance that feels like that author went down a list of what happens in a romance rather than tailoring the romantic moments to the characters and context. The result of this is an absolute lack of chemistry between Mika and Jamie, which is maddening since the book insists on stopping every few pages to remind us that these two are attracted to each other and changing their worldviews for each other.

CONCLUSION

This book could have been a middling cozy book about witches. Instead it is a plate of nothing with some uncomfortable content for garnishing. I don’t even have a real conclusion for this book, other than the note that while finishing this review I realized that “white British lady takes south Indian girl from her home” is a component of one of my favourite movies, except in that movie the incident actually drives the entire plot, so I’m going to go listen to the background score from RRR for the five hundredth time. Goodbye.