A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

“Autumn had only just arrived in the northwest of England, bringing with it an unseasonably merry sky, leaves of toasted gold and burnt orange, and, most distressingly, the corpse in the back garden.”

This early description is delivered in the second sentence of the first chapter and helps ground the text within its multiple genres. The novel is cozy, domestic fiction, and these facts are represented by the personification of the sky and the image of autumn leaves. Even so, the novel’s darker fantasy elements are hinted at in the starkly incongruous reference to “the corpse in the back garden.” These contrasting descriptions foreshadow the novel’s blend of disparate writing styles.

“As a collector of rare, powerful spells of dubious legality and even more questionable morality, Clemmie knew all sorts of spells that other people didn’t.”

This description indirectly characterizes Clemmie as morally ambiguous. She has not yet explained her transformation into the form of a fox, but her penchant for legally “dubious” and morally “questionable” spells suggests that she is not an upstanding citizen in the witching world. By extension, she is clearly capable of deceit and selfishness, and she does later lapse and enact a betrayal of Sera on the night of the masquerade at Bertram-Mogg’s estate.

“The Guild was strict, stuffy, and entirely too fond of looking down their noses at everybody. Their snobbery (and the inevitable generations of inbreeding that came with it) meant that of all the witches born in the country each year, the vast majority were born into the fifteen or so families who could trace their magical history all the way back to the founding of the Guild in the 1600s.”

This description characterizes the elitism, racism, and patriarchal mindset of the British Guild of Sorcery, which is clearly more interested in consolidating its power than in fairly governing the magical world. By prioritizing whiteness via family, national, and ethnic “pedigree” rather than treating all young witches equally or striving to embrace diverse backgrounds and abilities, the Guild fails witches like Sera, Luke, and Posy, who do not fit the mainstream mold.