First Lines Friday is a weekly feature hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

Here’s how it works!

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
• Finally… reveal the book!

“The Very Secret Society of Witches met on the third Thursday of every third month, but that was just about the only thing that never changed.”

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna

I finished reading The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches last week and I really enjoyed it. It was such a cozy book, which made it perfect for the snowy weekend we had here. I loved the characters and the setting. I also love found family and the grumpy/sunshine trope, which were both found in this book. I also liked that even though it was a witchy book, it didn’t scream Halloween and it could be easily enjoyed any time of year.

 Title: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

Author: Sangu Mandanna

Genre: Fantasy and Romance

Age Category: Adult

Publication Date: August 23, 2022

Number of Pages: 316

Buy the Book: Amazon, Indigo, Book Depository

Add On Goodreads

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 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….

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