Sangu Mandanna

A warm and uplifting novel about an isolated witch whose opportunity to embrace a quirky new family—and a new love—changes the course of her life.

As one of the few witches in Britain, Mika Moon knows she has to hide her magic, keep her head down, and stay away from other witches so their powers don’t mingle and draw attention. And as an orphan who lost her parents at a young age and was raised by strangers, she’s used to being alone and she follows the rules...with one exception: an online account, where she posts videos "pretending" to be a witch. She thinks no one will take it seriously.
 
But someone does. An unexpected message arrives, begging her to travel to the remote and mysterious Nowhere House to teach three young witches how to control their magic. It breaks all of the rules, but Mika goes anyway, and is immediately tangled up in the lives and secrets of not only her three charges, but also an absent archaeologist, a retired actor, two long-suffering caretakers, and…Jamie. The handsome and prickly librarian of Nowhere House would do anything to protect the children, and as far as he’s concerned, a stranger like Mika is a threat. An irritatingly appealing threat.
 
As Mika begins to find her place at Nowhere House, the thought of belonging somewhere begins to feel like a real possibility. But magic isn't the only danger in the world, and when peril comes knocking at their door, Mika will need to decide whether to risk everything to protect a found family she didn’t know she was looking for....

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

It was a knife that went right between her ribs, a thrust that drew blood. And hadn’t he meant it to? Hadn’t he wanted her to bleed the way he was bleeding?

So why, then, did he wish he could take it back?

arie

“I can’t transform the world, Jamie. The world’s too big and too messy and too stubborn.” 

“Who said anything about transforming the world?” He shrugged. “What about just making it a little better? And then a little better? And then a little more, until, one day, maybe long after we’re gone, it has transformed? You deserve more than what you’re allowing yourself to have.”

Love a book that can make me laugh out loud

Emma

"That was some excellent Mary Poppins shit right there."

Liz Griffin

It was a bit like that old philosophical question about a tree falling in the woods, wasn't it? If no one remembered her, and she didn't matter to anyone, did she  really exist?

Megan BV

Nowhere House was shifting in Mika’s mind. The new Nowhere House was messier than the first, a place made up of fractured pieces that, somehow, had come together to make something whole and wonderful.

Danger rarely wore a monstrous face and a wielded a pitchfork. No, danger came most often in the form of people like Edward, the nice people whose niceness only went so deep, who saved their niceness for people exactly like them, who believed they were more deserving of power and respect than anyone who was a little bit different.

Ian Brakspear

Niceness is all about what we do when other people are looking. Kindness, on the other hand, runs deep. Kindness is what happens when no one's looking."

“That was some excellent Mary Poppins shit right there.”

“No, she’s fine,” Jamie heard himself say.

What—and he could not overstate this—the fuck? He’d just had the perfect opportunity to politely rid himself of the dog, the dog’s owner, and the dog’s persistent fur. Why hadn’t he taken it?

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches quotes

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