If you loved how Immanuelle stands up to the Prophet’s rule in Bethel—decoding her mother’s journal, braving the Darkwood, and turning the plagues into a reckoning—then you’ll click with the Eastwood sisters as they resurrect lost spells to challenge the men who’ve outlawed their power. Like the way Ezra risks himself to help Immanuelle, alliances here are forged under pressure, and every charm and rhyme feels as dangerous as the blood-marked rites in The Year of the Witching.

The secretive, ritual-heavy magic that Immanuelle uncovers—inked in her mother’s journal and steeped in the Darkwood’s bargains—has a chilling echo in Jane’s discovery of her husband’s forbidden workings. As Bethel is wracked by plagues, Jane’s world is shaken by doors that won’t stay shut and rites that should never be attempted. If the dangerous, transgressive feel of the forest’s witchcraft grabbed you, this is that same dread sharpened to a knife.

Bethel’s sermons, public punishments, and the Prophet’s absolute authority mirror the way Gilead twists holy language into law. If you were gripped by Immanuelle challenging doctrine—sneaking into the Darkwood, questioning the Prophet’s lineage, and forcing Bethel to face its sins—you’ll find Offred’s quiet resistance and coded acts of rebellion a chilling, resonant companion piece.

Bethel keeps women in their place with fear—branding Immanuelle an outcast for her parentage and using the Prophet’s rule to justify cruelty. In the county of Garner, teenage girls are exiled for a ‘grace year’ so their supposed magic can burn off. If the way Immanuelle is scapegoated, hunted, and finally turns that system against itself hooked you, this brutal rite-of-passage will feel hauntingly familiar.

If the bleak intensity of Bethel—the Prophet’s cruelty, the forest’s curses, and the town’s complicity—stayed with you, Vern’s escape from the Cainland commune will hit the same nerve. As Immanuelle confronts plagues and buried truths about her mother, Vern survives on the run with newborns while her body changes in terrifying ways, forcing her to face the rot at the heart of the world that made her.