![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThe Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
3/5. Cozy fantasy about a real witch pretending to be a fake witch online who gets recruited to come to a remote country house to tutor three young witches, except that’s not supposed to be a thing because witches aren’t allowed to be near each other, also the grumpy librarian is hot.
I don’t know guys, maybe I interrogate cozy books from the wrong direction, but why do they always have something deeply uncozy lurking just under the surface? I suppose it does make sense. You can’t tell a story about a deeply lonely person finding a mismatched family without setting up the circumstances of their deep and shattering loneliness. Here that is by way of the dumb ‘witches have to be isolated rule’ which, it turns out, is probably just someone enacting her trauma on dozens of other people and claiming it's for their own good. This book has a lot of compassion for that and why it happened, which, well. I can respect that. But as the victim of generational trauma myself, it really didn’t warm the cockles of my heart. Quite the opposite. Maybe it would work better on someone else.
Anyway, yeah, this is mostly charming found family with witches stuff and grumpy/sunshine romance stuff and nice magic world building stuff. Just, you know, also the deeply uncozy bits.
3/5. Cozy fantasy about a real witch pretending to be a fake witch online who gets recruited to come to a remote country house to tutor three young witches, except that’s not supposed to be a thing because witches aren’t allowed to be near each other, also the grumpy librarian is hot.
I don’t know guys, maybe I interrogate cozy books from the wrong direction, but why do they always have something deeply uncozy lurking just under the surface? I suppose it does make sense. You can’t tell a story about a deeply lonely person finding a mismatched family without setting up the circumstances of their deep and shattering loneliness. Here that is by way of the dumb ‘witches have to be isolated rule’ which, it turns out, is probably just someone enacting her trauma on dozens of other people and claiming it's for their own good. This book has a lot of compassion for that and why it happened, which, well. I can respect that. But as the victim of generational trauma myself, it really didn’t warm the cockles of my heart. Quite the opposite. Maybe it would work better on someone else.
Anyway, yeah, this is mostly charming found family with witches stuff and grumpy/sunshine romance stuff and nice magic world building stuff. Just, you know, also the deeply uncozy bits.