Sangu Mandanna

Books: Fantasy | Romance | Queer

A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping (2025)

Sera was fifteen when she lost most of her magic.

Choosing her love for Jasmine over her loyalty to the British Guild of Sorcery wasn’t exactly difficult for Sera. The Guild was strict, stuffy, and entirely too fond of looking down their noses at almost everybody.

Now, barred from magical society, she helps her aunt run the (semi) magical inn.

Just weeks after she’d turned eighteen, her parents had decided she could now stand on her own two feet. They’d signed over the deed and the mortgage, kissed and congratulated her as if they hadn’t just plonked a crumbling colossus in her lap, and tootled off.

Luke is a magical historian who is struggling to manage his younger sister, because their parents find her too much to handle.

While it was tempting to lay the blame at Posy’s door for her obsession with leaves, or even at Mother Nature’s for having the temerity to invent leaves, Luke was only too aware that he was the one who had brought his small, impulsive, autistic sister to stay at the Guild’s estate, a place of rules, decorum, and one too many disapproving gargoyles roaming its hallowed halls.

Unbeknownst to either, there are magicians who would like to see Sera get her magic back.

"By the way, if you saw a fox in the library on your way out last night, you didn’t."

"I didn’t," Luke agreed.

"Very good, Luke. That’s very convincing."

"No, I really didn’t. Should I have?"

"No," said Verity at once.

This story is about living in a world that doesn’t accept you as you are by finding family that loves you just as you are.

"I don’t see why anyone needs to explain anything," Matilda said reproachfully. "If I’ve gone two full years not seeing wildflowers bursting to life in teacups and not hearing foxes speak English and not noticing implausible skeletal chickens running around the place, I have no idea why anyone thinks a floating child will shake me out of my equilibrium."

(S)he had realised that the thing he’d needed hadn’t been a toasty fireplace at all.
He’d needed someone to see him, armour and sword and all. To hear his ridiculous introduction and accept his courtly bow. And still say Come in.

Ah, Nicholas.

Nicholas, on the other hand, had the courage of a lion, the lovability of a puppy, and the common sense of a goldfish.

But really, almost everyone who lives at the inn is lovely and adorable.

Matilda said regretfully to Luke, and then, like she’d only just taken proper notice of him, did a comical double take. "Well. Well. Did it hurt? When you fell out of whichever Norse myth you came from?"

Except Clemmie, who is clearly untrustworthy, yet Sera trusts her anyway.

"That’s not fair," said Clemmie, sounding genuinely wounded. "I would never have let anything happen to him."

"You’re what happened to him!" Sera reminded her.

It’s just the warm hug I needed.

Characters: Sera Swan, Great-Auntie Jasmine Ponnappa, Clemmie / Clementine Bennet, Albert Grey, Francesca Grey, Roo-Roo, Nicholas, Matilda, Theo, Luke Larsen, Posy, Verity Walter, Bradford Bertram-Mogg, Howard Hawtrey, Alex, Malik, Elliot, Evie, Chancellor Bennet, Mrs. Cooper, Lionel Bennet, Zahra, Martin

Cover illustration by Lisa Perrin

Publisher: Berkley

Rating: 9/10