James Nicoll Reviews

2025‘s Vanya and the Wild Hunt is the first volume of Sangu Mandanna’s middle-grade magical-school contemporary fantasy series.

Aside from her ADHD and her parent’s curious reticence about their past, Vanya is an unremarkable Anglo-Indian British schoolgirl.

Well, there is the matter of the rare books in her parents’ bookstore talking to her. And the books’ frustratingly vague prognostications, which Vanya discounts. And the horrifying monster who breaks into the family home.

The Old One is known by many names but the bogeyman will do. While threatening Vanya’s parents, the bogeyman makes it clear that the attack is not random, that the bogeyman knows Vanya’s parents, that they had a truce, and that the truce is now broken. All of this is astonishing to Vanya. She does manage to respond successfully, planting her mother’s magic knife in the bogeyman’s chest. Big surprise for the bogeyman.

Explanations follow. Vanya’s parents come from magical lineages. These lineages, the archwitches, share a knack for seeing Old Ones like the bogeyman, something most humans cannot do. Therefore, the archwitches serve as humanity’s protectors against the malevolent Old Ones.

Or at least some do. Clearly, Vanya’s mother would prefer to leave that struggle behind. Vanya’s father supports her in this. However, this may no longer be possible. The bookstore and the flat above it are clearly vulnerable. Vanya’s parents can take care of themselves. Vanya cannot. Happily, there is a solution: Auramere.

Auramere is a school for archwitches. Among its many benefits, magical protections that prevent uninvited guests from eating the students. Vanya can learn magic at Auramere, and she can do so with the least amount of risk possible… which is still not zero.

There are of course challenges. Vanya has never excelled at making new friends. Her ADHD complicates learning an entirely new field from scratch. Most importantly, it is painfully clear that the school’s defenses have a major flaw:

The defenses are of no use against an enemy who is within the barriers¹.

~oOo~

I’m afraid I do not have room here to discuss the scientific implications of assuming a gene that confers magical powers. However, the book doesn’t state this as a fact; the gene (or gene complex) is just a guess on the archwitches’ part. They’re not scientists.

The book has nicely done illustrations, which, unfortunately are not well suited to reproduction in ebooks. They don’t have the same impact and the ebook file is huge. Hence, I suspect that many readers might prefer to buy the novel in paper.

I started reading this book with the wrong expectations. I was hoping for something along the lines of the author’s The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches. I should have checked my assumptions. After all, the marketing for this book makes it pretty clear that the target audience and the approach taken to the subject material aren’t at all like those same things in Very Secret.

It would have been better to take this as an example of the magical boarding school genre, of which examples abound, back to The Worst Witch or A Wizard of Earthsea, and no doubt earlier. The novel does provide the necessary essentials for readers who may be encountering this genre for the first time (which is to say, the actual target market, not people like me), including a quick introduction to magic, the usual magical conflicts, boarding schools, and so on.

Additionally, Mandanna choses as her first-person protagonist someone with whom many readers will identify, someone who isn’t the usual omnicompetent plucky boy hero. Vanya is less The Chosen One and more The Self-Selected One. Points for bold life choices.

My only real complaints, once I set aside ​“this is not the book it never promised to be” are twofold: one, that it ends on a cliff-hanger, and two, that the publisher does not make it clear that the book is part of a series. That baffles me: if being part of a series is something that readers dislike enough to conceal, why not commission stand-alones? Publishers baffle me.

Vanya and the Wild Hunt is available here (Macmillan), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: USA delenda est.