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....

Before we get to the review part, here’s something fun. To get in the right mindset of the book, I made a mood board for it! The book is super cute and cozy and witchy and that’s what I tried to convey with this mood board. I loved making it, and I definitely want to make more! Let me know if that’s something you’d like to see.

The Happy Place 5 is a monthly series where a few friends and I post 5 of our favorites books for a certain topic or theme. The name is from a Discord group that I am a part of. We created the space to have a positive environment for a handful of close friends. All of us are bookworms, and many of us are bookstagrammers and bloggers. So we decided to start a blog post series together! I’ll link my friends blogs and posts for this month’s topic at the end of this post.

We all know that my two favorite genres are science fiction and fantasy, so what’s even better than that? A MASHUP OF THE TWO!!! I’m sure this surprises no one at all that this is the genre hybrid I chose to talk about today haha. I’m sure some of these you’ve heard me talk about before, but I can’t resist the chance to push them on you again!!

In a universe of capricious gods, dark moons, and kingdoms built on the backs of spaceships, a cursed queen sends her infant daughter away, a jealous uncle steals the throne of Kali from his nephew, and an exiled prince vows to take his crown back.
Raised alone and far away from her home on Kali, Esmae longs to return to her family. When the King of Wychstar offers to gift the unbeatable, sentient warship Titania to a warrior that can win his competition, she sees her way home: she’ll enter the competition, reveal her true identity to the world, and help her famous brother win back the crown of Kali.
It’s a great plan. Until it falls apart.
Inspired by the Mahabharata and other ancient Indian stories, A Spark of White Fire is a lush, sweeping space opera about family, curses, and the endless battle between jealousy and love.

Retellings are hugely popular in young adult books these days. I love them, but I’m getting tired of the same fairytale being redone over and over. So thank goodness I finally picked up this one! This is a retelling of the longest epic poem ever, the Indian poem called The Mahabharata. I don’t know much about the original, except what I read on Wikipedia. Knowing that it’s a non-Western retelling kinda makes me love it already without reading it haha.

Another thing that intrigued me right away was that the gods and goddesses were a part of the story. I loooove that so much. It also means that since this is set in space, it is a space fantasy! Aka my favorite genre! And in my opinion, a genre we need a lot more of.