The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

 The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna 318 pages

Summary: 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 a threat 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....

My Thoughts: This book was exactly what I needed after reading such an intense book "The Personal Librarian". It was funny, it was light, but also had this theme of feeling lonely and isolated. The characters all had different personalities, but somehow they all fit together perfectly. I loved the take on witch magic in this book. 

THE BLACK BIRD ORACLE (All Souls #5) by DEBORAH HARKNESS

 THE BLACK BIRD ORACLE (All Souls #5) by DEBORAH HARKNESS (444)

Deborah Harkness first introduced the world to Diana Bishop, Oxford scholar and witch, and vampire geneticist Matthew de Clairmont in A Discovery of Witches. Drawn to each other despite long-standing taboos, these two otherworldly beings found themselves at the center of a battle for a lost, enchanted manuscript known as Ashmole 782. Since then, they have fallen in love, traveled to Elizabethan England, dissolved the Covenant between the three species, and awoken the dark powers within Diana’s family line.

Now, Diana and Matthew receive a formal demand from the Congregation: They must test the magic of their seven-year-old twins, Pip and Rebecca. Concerned with their safety and desperate to avoid the same fate that led her parents to spellbind her, Diana decides to forge a different path for her family’s future and answers a message from a great-aunt she never knew existed, Gwyneth Proctor, whose invitation simply reads: It’s time you came home, Diana.

On the hallowed ground of Ravenswood, the Proctor family home, and under the tutelage of Gwyneth, a talented witch grounded in higher magic, a new era begins for Diana: a confrontation with her family’s dark past, and a reckoning for her own desire for even greater power—if she can let go, finally, of her fear of wielding it.

I have liked every book in this series, but I  find myself getting annoyed by the immaturity and arrogance of the main protagonist, Diana Bishop.

The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness

 The Book of Life (The All Souls Trilogy #3) by Deborah Harkness - 561 pages, Audiobook - 24 hours

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Diana and Matthew time-travel back from Elizabethan London. They left loved ones behind but have reunited with (most of) those in the present at Matthew's ancestral home. With Diana pregnant with twins and their enemies closing in, they must deal with secrets from Matthew's past being revealed while still searching for Ashmole 782 and its missing pages.

I like that she brought some characters we met in the past back into the story in the present. There were interesting and unexpected twists, and I thought she wrapped the story up well. The entire trilogy was extremely well written, and I loved all three books.

Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness

 Shadow of Night (The All Souls Trilogy #2) by Deborah Harkness - 584 pages, Audiobook - 24 hours, 30 minutes

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Picking up from A Discovery of Witches’ cliffhanger ending, Shadow of Night takes Diana and Matthew on a trip through time to Elizabethan London, where they are plunged into a world of spies, magic, and Matthew’s old friends, the School of Night. Their adventure is not restricted to London as they also travel to other countries, and Diana discovers more than she ever imagined about cultures and daily life in 1590.

Their search for Ashmole 782 takes interesting turns while Diana uncovers more of Matthew's secrets while the search for a witch to tutor her in magic turns out to be much more difficult than Matthew thought it would be.

I LOVE this series. I struggled a little with the reaction one of the characters had to Diana, but once I got a little way into this 2nd book, I just wanted to keep listening to see what happened next.

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

A Discovery of Witches (The All Souls Trilogy #1) by Deborah Harkness - 579 pages, Audiobook - 24 hours

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Deep in the stacks of Oxford's Bodleian Library, young scholar Diana Bishop unwittingly calls up a bewitched alchemical manuscript in the course of her research. Descended from an old and distinguished line of witches, Diana wants nothing to do with sorcery; so after a furtive glance and a few notes, she banishes the book to the stacks. But her discovery sets a fantastical underworld stirring, and a horde of daemons, witches, and vampires soon descends upon the library. Diana has stumbled upon a coveted treasure lost for centuries-and she is the only creature who can break its spell.

Diana is a bold heroine who meets her equal in vampire geneticist, Matthew Clairmont, and gradually warms up to him as their alliance deepens into an intimacy that violates age-old taboos.

I loved this book, and I really enjoyed listening to the audiobook and the different accents she used for the various characters. There are a lot of different characters and relationships between them, but she does a good job of making sure you know exactly what is going on with the various characters and groups. The ending definitely makes you want to start reading the next book in the series.