If you loved the offbeat, gentle courtship between Shesheshen and Homily, you'll melt for the slow-blooming bond between the ancient forest guardian Tobias Finch and curious folklorist Henry Silver in Silver in the Wood. The story keeps to the mossy edges and cottage-clearings, with quiet acts of care, old curses, and a romance that grows out of trust and shared secrets—much like how Shesheshen learns to navigate love and consent while hiding what she is. It’s intimate, woodsy, and just eerie enough to prickle the skin.

You enjoyed how Someone You Can Build a Nest In balances grisly practicality (bone-collecting, peculiar courtship gifts) with wry asides. Nettle & Bone hits that same sweet spot: Marra’s quest involves sewing a cloak of nettles, a bone dog, and a demon-possessed chicken—and yet the jokes land as softly as the kindness between misfits. Like Shesheshen’s deadpan humor in a village that would happily torch her, Marra’s party snickers at the abyss even as they face very real dangers.

If the close-in, hearth-warm feel of Shesheshen and Homily’s rural life drew you in, Thornhedge keeps the lens just as tight: Toadling, a changeling raised by fae, stands watch over a bramble-choked tower, trading cautious, tender conversations with a patient knight named Halim. It’s the same soft, boundary-respecting intimacy you liked—two unlikely souls meeting in a quiet place, secrets carefully unwrapped, with the stakes centered on a single cursed life rather than a sprawling epic.

Shesheshen’s morally knotty choices—hiding what she is, deciding whom to protect, and whom to let the village gossip devour—mirror Angrboda’s life with Loki in The Witch’s Heart. Angrboda builds a hidden home in the woods, raises children fated to terrify gods, and must choose between personal safety and the brutal honesty love demands. If you appreciated how the book let a not-quite-human woman love fiercely while making compromises that aren’t clean, this delivers that same ache and fire.

If the heart of Shesheshen and Homily’s story was making a literal nest—turning danger and otherness into a home—then The House in the Cerulean Sea will hit you right in the sternum. Linus Baker arrives to assess a seaside orphanage run by Arthur Parnassus and meets children like Lucy (the Antichrist) and Chauncey (who dreams of being a bellhop). As in Shesheshen’s hard-won trust and tenderness, the joy here is watching outsiders become family, and realizing a home is who you protect.