This guest review is from Crystal Anne! Crystal Anne with An E comes to us from a sunny clime, but prefers to remain a pale indoor cat. She enjoys reading, cross-stitching something nerdy, going to see live music, and playing video games. She works as an autism consultant by day, got a degree in information science for fun, and currently serves on her local library advisory board.

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The brain is a funny thing.

My reading over the last couple of months had become, well, quite dark. I should say that I don’t necessarily find anything wrong with reading dark books. Do you, and enjoy yourself. What I find with my own brain is that sometimes, especially after a streak of primarily reading darker books, I find my brain needs to shift gears and do a Fast and Furious style 180.

Naturally, as one does in this situation, I decided to search out some reading that would be funny and sweet and maybe magical.

Also, very pink.

So, I yoinked out A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna ( A | BN | K | AB ). I had not read anything by this author previous to this, but the summary and cover seemed to promise exactly what I was after.

And, oh, it delivered.

That book was a warm hug, a cup of peppermint tea, and the stickiest cinnamon bun ever. When it finished, I immediately started her first book, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches ( A | BN | K | AB ), because my brain was not ready to leave the worlds that Mandanna had created.

So let us break down those worlds, shall we?

Caretaking

The characters in these books are utterly caring for one another. At every turn, someone is constantly thinking of the well-being of someone they love, and working actively to preserve that person’s safety and happiness.

Dry Humor

The humor runs toward being very arch and British (which, given that Mandanna herself is British, is not super-surprising). I enjoy dry British humor, and these books do this very well. There are also nice touches of absurdity here and there (the undead rooster being my favorite), and they balance the urgency of the stakes well.

Stakes

Ah, the stakes.

I listened to Mandanna’s appearance on the She Wore Black podcast, and I was very struck by her approach to stakes in her books. She said that cozy doesn’t mean devoid of stakes or urgency, it’s just that those stakes may not be for the world or society at large, but those stakes ARE important and critical for the characters. I liked that approach a great deal, as I think we all can understand the idea of balancing our care for the things going on in the world with the things that are important to us and our happiness and well-being.

Kindness and Acceptance

In addition to the emphasis on caring, there’s also a strong emphasis on kindness and acceptance. In The Very Secret Society for Irregular Witches, the main character, Mika, while kind and loving to those around her, finds it hard to believe that others could accept and love her as she is, and that lack of belief informs her tendency to keep others at arm’s length.

  In A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping, Luke, in his protectiveness of his younger sister Posy, who is autistic and has significant communication differences, is constantly braced for people to be judgmental of her and frankly, ready to run away to keep her safe and un-judged.

Which is why, when instead of being judged or ridiculed, Posy is accepted and almost instantly loved by the residents of Batty Hole (that’s the inn, and what a fantastic name), he is caught very off-guard.

It’s alluded to that Luke himself is neurodivergent and also very possibly on the spectrum, but he learned to squash those traits and spend his entire life “masking”, because otherwise, he was punished for those traits in some way. It is part of what makes him skeptical of the idea that people could love and accept Posy just as she is, because he has never experienced that in his own life. It is when Mika accepts the love and kindness of those around her that she finds ways to extend that acceptance outward and form a community, when before, the witches in the story had always made a point of isolating themselves.

A Sensory Feast

Let’s talk about the sensory aspects of these books. You can practically smell the cinnamon buns and the tea, and you can almost see the magic glittering through the air. The writing loves to focus on these details, and they are, for lack of a better term, yummy. Mika in particular is described as a gifted potions witch, and I like to think that this is what her potions looked like.

It would be easy to take these aspects of a book, and make it too twee and sugary. These books avoid that by having some bite in that British humor. In addition, the characters in A Witch’s Guide have experienced trauma and bigotry, and that informs how they approach certain things, and they have had to reckon with and address their trauma. Sera, the heroine of A Witch’s Guide, has experienced the trauma of losing her magical abilities to save someone she loves, and it has made her grouchy and guarded, and is constantly having to do and redo the work of addressing her mental health and letting those around her carry some of the load.

I think that’s the most important thing about these books: no matter how messed up or grotesque we feel, there are people around us ready to show us how to be loved and cared for, and that we deserve love and care. Those people will likely err, but everyone will keep going, and everyone keeps doing that hard work, day after day, because the love and affection will continue.

It’s hard sometimes, especially right now, to feel okay about focusing on ourselves and our need for rest and recovery in a world that is constantly reminding us how on fire things are. It’s easy to feel powerless. We’re not, but we also cannot pour from an empty cup, and the characters in these books have to learn and re-learn that throughout these stories.

That, to me, is comfort.

What about you? Have you read these books? Were they as comforting for you?

I hope so. Comfort is a precious commodity at the moment. 

If you’d like to write a guest post examining some of your favorites, get in touch with Sarah!