Once, Sera Swan was one of the most powerful witches in Britain. Then she resurrected her great-aunt Jasmine from the (very recently) dead, lost most of her powers, befriended a semi-villainous talking fox, and was exiled from her Guild. Now she helps Jasmine run an enchanted inn in Lancashire, where she deals with their quirky guests’ shenanigans and longs for a future that seems lost. Until she finds about an old spell that could restore her power …
Enter Luke Larsen, handsome magical historian, who might have the key to unlocking the spell’s secrets. Luke has no interest in the inn’s madcap goings-on, and is even less interested in letting a certain bewitching innkeeper past his walls. So no one is more surprised than he is when he agrees to help.
Running an inn, reclaiming lost power, and staying one step ahead of the watchful Guild is a lot for anyone, but Sera is about to discover she doesn’t have to do alone – and that love might be the best magic of all.

Well, that was disappointing. I pre-ordered this because I loved Sangu Mandanna’s ‘The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches‘ (2022) and enjoyed her YA Sci Fi novel ‘The Lost Girl’ (2013). When I ordered it, there was no book cover, sample text or audio, but I was OK with that because I knew I liked Mandanna’s work. 

I began to suspect something was wrong when I saw the cover, which I think is a twee monstrosity. If I’d seen that cover on a book by an author I didn’t know, I’d have passed it by without a thought. 

My wife listened to the audiobook before I could get to it. She’d also loved ‘The Very Secret Society Of Irregular Witches’. She didn’t love this. She thought the romance element felt forced and that the sex scene was eye-rollingly bad. 

Still, we sometimes feel differently about books, so today, I dived in, hoping that all would be well. 

I only made it to the end of chapter two before I gave up. The first two chapters of the book set up the situation. The events were pretty traumatic. The beloved great aunt and de facto parent of a fifteen-year-old girl fell dead unexpectedly. The girl, a powerful but inexperienced and only partially trained witch, resurrects her great aunt but loses most of her ability to do magic in the process. Her magic, the foundation of her identity, had been ripped away in a moment. The future she’d believed was hers had been lost. 

This should have had me in tears, but it was delivered with all the emotional impact of a Teletubbies episode. I felt I was reading a children’s book of the kind that makes Disney seem hard-hitting. It dawned on me that the cover, which I’d treated with such disdain, might be a fair reflection of the tone of the book.

Maybe it gets better from Chapter Three onwards, but I’m not going to invest the time to find out.