★★★★☆ An adult middle-grade children's novel

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

Sangu Mandanna

When I began The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches I thought it was a middle-grade novel. The cover is very middle-grade-ish. And three of the main characters, the young witches girls Altamira, Terracotta, and Rosetta, are middle- grade or young-teen girls. The tone is also very middle-grade. As Sangu Mandanna writes in her Acknowledgements

When I started writing this book, we were eight months into the pandemic and all I wanted to work on was a warm, cozy, romantic story about magic and family.

And that, indeed, is what she wrote. Mika, our heroine, is a lonely, emotionally scarred young woman who finds a home and a family. It is all very warm and cozy -- it feels like the perfect middle-grade novel.

I was therefore a little surprised by this quote:

Her eyes very round, seven-year-old Altamira said, with perfect gravity, “That was some excellent Mary Poppins shit right there.”

That made me laugh and is completely consistent, in my experience, with the way actual seven-year-olds talk. So, although I was a little surprised, I was not taken aback. But then came this, spoken by an adult:

That is because I believe what you put in your body is your business, and that,” she added, raising her teacup to her lips, “includes penises.”

(I'm gonna have to clean this review up a bit to post it on Amazon.) OK, so that dispelled any illusions about whether I was reading a middle-grade children's book.

If any doubt remained after one of the characters used the word "penis", they were dispelled by the explicit sex scene later in the novel. Now, let me be clear, this is not a Fifty Shades of Grey sex scene. It is warm and loving and joyful -- if there were such a thing as a sex scene appropriate for middle-grade kids (which, to be COMPLETELY CLEAR, I AM NOT SUGGESTING), this would be it.

This paragon of coziness gets a much-needed jolt at about 70-80%, when a plot unexpectedly shows up. It's actually quite a good plot, and I definitely found the last quarter of the novel the most enjoyable part. I kind of wish it had been foreshadowed a bit more, so I could have appreciated it for longer. (To be clear, it was foreshadowed, but I completely overlooked the clues, so that's on me.)

So, a fun book -- perfect for sexually active adults who never matured past the mental age of ten.

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