If the way Lexi stalks the moor of Near while the wind carries rumors and children vanish pulled you in, you’ll love how Small Favors traps you in the isolated town of Amity Falls as uncanny bargains start to unravel the community from within. Like the two old witches who warn Lexi, whispered warnings here come from the woods themselves, and the menace feels as intimate—and as inescapable—as the lanes and doorways of Near.

When the Near Witch’s legend stirs and the wind seems to have hands, the magic in The Near Witch feels elemental and mysterious. The Bear and the Nightingale offers that same uncanny, untamed wonder—spirits in ovens and forests, old stories with teeth—while a brave girl, much like Lexi defying the council’s fear of Cole, pushes back against a village terrified of what it doesn’t understand.

If you loved how Schwab’s language turns the moor and the wind into characters—how you can almost hear the Near Witch breathing in the heather—Uprooted will sweep you up. Its sentences bloom with the same enchantment, and the creeping corruption of the Wood echoes the quiet dread Lexi feels when she realizes the night itself may be stealing children away.

Like the slow, wind-borne dread that follows Lexi and Cole as they hunt the truth behind Near’s disappearances, Gaiman’s tale starts with a hush and grows into something vast and unsettling. The way everyday lanes and kitchen tables become thresholds to danger mirrors how the familiar paths around Near turn treacherous once the old story wakes up.

If Lexi’s defiance—sneaking past town men who dismiss her, seeking help from the old witches when children start vanishing—was your favorite part, The Year of the Witching delivers a heroine with that same steel. Immanuelle confronts a rigid, frightened community and the dark woods beyond its borders, much as Lexi faces Near’s elders and the legend everyone would rather ignore.