Happy Friday, all!

As we get closer to Halloween, I’ve gone witchy with my reading: Sangu Mandanna’s The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches and Bianca Marais’s The Witches of Moonshyne Manor.

I adored The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, which is basically Jenny Colgan with witches, the same wonderful, warm tone, and the same sort of story about someone finding the place that’s meant to be home (in this case, in a corner of Norfolk, in a house with very powerful wards, and three young witches who need to learn to control their powers).  Basically, it’s a governess book, and you all know how I love governess books.

The Witches of Moonshyne Manor is also billed as a witchy rom com, but isn’t really.  Once I realized it was more a buddy novel, I was able to enjoy the voice and the world-building as a group of octogenarian witches in a crumbling old house fight to keep the angry townspeople from foreclosing and knocking it all down.

Leaving aside the witches for the moment, I dipped into Christopher Fowler’s long-running Bryant and May series, about two aging detectives in the Peculiar Crimes Unit in London.  I’d been warned that the first book wasn’t actually the best place to start, so I began with book two, The Water Room, in which a series of mysteries deaths take place in a small part of Kentish Town, all linked somehow to London’s lost rivers.

What have you been reading this week?