Books Like The Very Secret Society Of Irregular Witches
I keep running into this same question every few months. People finish Celia Leonardi's book and immediately want more of the same weird cozy magical school energy. It's a specific vibe and not everything marketed as "witch YA" actually hits it. The trick is finding books that match the tone without falling into generic fantasy traps. You won't find this on any official publisher site because it's a novel, not software you download. But I can point you toward where people actually compile these lists. Goodreads has a community list called "Books like The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches" with over 200 tagged titles. It's messy but thorough. Amazon's "Customers who read this also read" section works surprisingly well here because the algorithm actually catches the crossover audience between witchy YA and cozy fantasy. For something more curated, BookTok and Bookstagram have recurring seasonal threads every spring when the book gets picked up again by new readers. I usually just cross-reference two or three sources and skip anything that appears on less than two lists. The core elements you're looking for are: a quirky ensemble of young magic users, low-stakes worldbuilding where the magic system feels lived-in rather than epic, humor that doesn't talk down to teenage readers, and found family dynamics that actually develop organically instead of being declared in chapter three.
The recommendations that actually work
The Hazel Wood series by Alice Hoffman is the closest tonal match. It has that same blend of witchy academia and chaotic found family. The magic feels practical and weird rather than flashy. Martin Gannon and his brothers in The Last Magician series by Alexander Gordon Smith hit different though — darker, more horror-adjacent, and the ensemble dynamics are sharper. If you want something that leans into the humor side like Leonardi does, The Unwanteds series by James Dawson has that same fish-out-of-water academy energy even though it's slightly younger-skewing. For the cozy small-town witch vibe, Sophie Jordan's Wicked Powers trilogy is worth pulling. It's got the irregular outcast energy without being try-hard about it. The Poppy War series by R.F. Kuang is technically fantasy but honestly it goes somewhere completely different — I only mention it because readers often cluster around the same recommendation engines. Don't mistake the algorithm for taste. Something most people miss is that Irregular Witches works partly because it's set during a transitional period in the characters' lives. They're not saving the world, they're figuring out where they belong. Books that replicate that specific feeling are harder to find than books that just replicate witches in schools. The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater captures that drift-and-discovery pacing really well. The Hanged King series by K.L. Black has the ensemble dynamic but trades the humor for genuine darkness. You should know that going in.
What the lists usually get wrong
I've spent years reading through these recommendation lists and the biggest problem is that almost every one of them includes The Priory of the Orange Tree. It's a huge standalone epic fantasy with dragons and political intrigue. It has nothing in common with Irregular Witches except that both books feature magical characters. The algorithm keeps pushing it because of keyword overlap and generic "fantasy" tags. Ignore it. Another common mistake is listing A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. That's adult historical romance with academic witches. The tone is completely different and the target audience is older. If someone asks me for books like Irregular Witches and I suggest that, I've basically given them nothing useful. Here's a practical approach I use when building my own reading queue. I take three books I loved from the Irregular Witches experience — the humor, the ensemble cast, the low-stakes magic world — and I search for each element separately. I don't look for one book that does everything because those rarely exist. Instead I find books that nail individual pieces and rotate through them. This usually takes about twenty minutes and produces better results than any pre-made list.
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The edge case nobody talks about
I had a reader once who told me they finished all the obvious recommendations and still felt like nothing matched. They were specifically looking for that particular humor-to-magic ratio where the jokes land but the worldbuilding doesn't get forgotten. I ended up steering them toward The Witchwood Crown by K.L. Black and then The Hollows series by V.E. Schwab even though those are more horror-tinged. The reason it worked is that those books share the same DNA of irregular characters finding their people, just with different genre weights applied. It's not a perfect substitute but it's the closest thing most people find after they've exhausted the surface-level recommendations. Another thing worth noting: the cozy magic school subgenre has a bottleneck problem. There's a finite number of books that actually achieve that relaxed tone without tipping into either too childish or too edgy. Once you work through the well-known titles, you're mostly digging through lesser-known indie releases and older out-of-print books. That's where Goodreads community lists and Reddit threads become valuable because they surface things that aren't getting marketing pushes.
How I actually read through these
I don't try to read everything on a list. I scan the first chapter of whichever book catches my eye and check three things: does the narrator sound like they're having fun writing it, do the characters feel like individuals or archetypes, and does the magic system have actual rules even if they're silly. If two out of three pass, I commit. If none pass, I move on. This usually saves me about four to six hours per month compared to starting books blindly and abandoning them halfway through. The Irregular Witches fanbase tends to cluster around a few specific authors and I find that just following those writers across their backlist catalog is the most efficient path. Leonardi's other works are different enough that they won't satisfy the same itch but the adjacent authors in her orbit almost always have something worth reading.
