Sasha Peyton Smith Books

Sasha Peyton Smith is originally from Utah and now lives in Washington DC. Her debut, The Witch Haven, was published in 2021 by Simon and Schuster and put her on the New York Times list; The Witch Hunt followed in 2022 and closed the duology. In February 2025 she opened a second series with The Rose Bargain from Harper, with the sequel The Thorn Queen scheduled for April 2026. Two duologies, both historical, both driven by a young woman signing something she should have read more carefully.

Period specificity and cost are what define her. Smith does the research and it surfaces in the small details: the sanitarium paperwork, the seamstress piecework, the way a girl without money in 1911 has exactly one bad option and knows it. Her magic always carries a price and she collects on it rather than letting the narrative forgive the debt. She also writes grief unusually well for the age category. The Witch Haven is as much a book about a dead brother as it is a book about witches, and the second volume follows that thread further than most sequels would dare.

The Witch Haven opens in 1911 New York with Frances Hallowell, a seamstress whose employer dies violently and who is quietly removed to Haxahaven Sanitarium, which turns out to be a school for witches rather than an asylum. The Witch Hunt sends her to Paris, where a spell she cast to speak with her dead brother has torn the veil between living and dead, and she chases the repair through secret societies, the Louvre, and the catacombs. The Rose Bargain shifts to an alternate Britain ruled by the fairy queen Mor, where young women make Rose Bargains before entering society. Ivy Benton, whose family was shunned after her sister Lydia made a terrible bargain and vanished, signs her name in blood first when the queen announces a competition for Prince Bram's hand, and finds an unexpected ally in his rakish brother Emmett, who is helping her for a price of his own.

Heat sits between 2 and 2.5 on the spice scale, with The Witch Haven rated 2.5. This is firmly young adult: tension, a handful of kisses, nothing explicit on the page. The Rose Bargain is more romance-forward than the Witch Haven books without being hotter, so readers arriving for the courtship plot will get it, and readers arriving for heat will not.

She matters to this audience mostly because of where The Rose Bargain sits. The pitch is The Selection meets The Cruel Prince in the Regency era, and unusually the book delivers on both halves rather than borrowing the comparison and hoping. Smith is also one of the few authors writing witch fantasy where the historical setting operates as a constraint on what the characters can do rather than as costume around a modern sensibility. The 1911 books in particular understand that magic does not solve poverty.

Worth knowing before you start: her endings are not tidy. Both the Witch Haven duology and, on current evidence, the Rose Bargain series resolve at a cost the protagonist has to keep carrying. Readers who want the bargain undone and everything restored will finish frustrated. Readers who wanted the price to be real will find her one of the more satisfying writers in the category.

Start with The Witch Haven if atmosphere and grief appeal more than romance, and if early twentieth century New York is a setting you want to spend time in. Start with The Rose Bargain if you want fae bargains and a competition plot, which is the better hook for anyone arriving from Holly Black. The two duologies share nothing but an author, so there is no wrong order.