To Vex & To Hex

Witchy small-town romance has become one of the busiest shelves in the shop, and most of its heroines are bakers, potion-makers or reluctant heirs to a coven. Neena Noon gives hers a stranger and more lovable gift. Lucy Ansari can feel when a book wants a particular reader, and she nudges the two together like a matchmaker at a party. To Vex & To Hex by Neena Noon is a debut that knows exactly which readers it wants, and for long stretches it finds them: it is funny, warm, very explicit and openly about loneliness, though its plotting is less sure-footed than its heart.

To Vex & To Hex Plot Summary

Lucy has managed Crawley Books in the Long Island town of Little Brook for years, baking for the café counter and selling flowers from her own garden. When Charles Crawley, the eighty-year-old witch who owns the shop and has been a grandfather to her in all but blood, falls down his stairs and needs a hip replacement, his grandson arrives from Dublin to take over. Grayson is an English professor on sabbatical, has no magic, and has not visited in two decades. Lucy decides he is after the shop and sets out to hex him into leaving. He decides she is in his way and sets out to annoy her into quitting. Told in alternating chapters from both sides, the story runs from November through a snowbound Christmas Eve and into spring.

Where It Sits on the Witchy Romance Shelf

This is a standalone and Noon’s first novel, published by St. Martin’s Griffin and out now, since 3 November 2026. It belongs with the cosy-magic romances that took off after Erin Sterling’s books, but it is closer in temperature to an office-rivals story than to a coven drama. In To Vex & To Hex by Neena Noon there is no wider witch society, no prophecy and no villain. The stakes are a bookshop, an old man’s recovery and two people who have never felt wanted. Readers looking for a Halloween book should know that the calendar starts after Halloween and lingers longest over Christmas.

What the Bookshop Witch Brings

The magic system is small and well judged. Lucy’s spells work on intent rather than incantation, but they need her full attention, so a distraction can drop everything she is holding. Magical repairs never hold for good, which is why a broken mug still goes in the bin. Magic cannot mend a hip after surgery, and it cannot make anyone do anything, which is the only reason Grayson ever gets a word in.

What works

• The prank war. A stolen toaster, a hidden kettle, an empty oat milk carton and a rainbow of colour-coded romances reshelved alphabetically: the hostilities are petty in exactly the right way, and Noon writes slapstick with good timing.
• Grayson’s loneliness. Under the tweed and the Latin is a man who realises nobody in Ireland would notice if he vanished. His first trip down every grocery aisle with Charles, slow and impractical and full of stories about his mother, is the best scene in the first half.
• Main Street as family. The poker-playing old men, the Pilates studio next door and the Mexican restaurant owner who befriends Grayson give the town a pulse.
• A defence of booksellers. Grayson’s defence of bookselling as real work, and a stubborn non-reader finally converted by Lucy’s book-magic, will land hard with anyone who has worked behind a till.

Where It Gives Ground

• The same misunderstanding, twice. A nervous laugh in a parked car at Christmas, then a single overheard sentence and some unanswered texts in spring: both crises run on two people refusing to ask a direct question, and the second feels like a rerun.
• Repetitive physical description. In the middle chapters of To Vex & To Hex by Neena Noon, heat pools, blood roars and hearts squeeze on almost every page, and the sex scenes reuse the same beats.
• Lucy’s parents change too quickly. Years of quiet neglect from two neuroscientists who treat her job as a stopgap are fixed in one tearful conversation.
• Uneven register. Lucy’s very online voice and Grayson’s lecture-hall formality sometimes undercut the emotional scenes instead of contrasting with them.

Is To Vex & To Hex a Standalone?

Yes. To Vex & To Hex by Neena Noon is complete in itself, with an epilogue that closes the main couple’s story. The acknowledgments announce Noon’s next romance for winter 2027, but nothing in the text says whether it returns to Little Brook. Lucy’s best friend, a banker with a crush on a colleague and a running joke about being cursed, is the obvious candidate if it does.

Read These Next

If To Vex & To Hex by Neena Noon left you wanting more magic behind the counter, try these.

1. The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna, another lonely South Asian witch who finds her people, with a prickly academic love interest.
2. The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling for a small-town witch, a hex that misfires and a high-heat payoff.
3. The Hating Game by Sally Thorne, the template for two colleagues who weaponise the office until they cannot keep their hands off each other.
4. Book Lovers by Emily Henry if the bookish banter and the small-town setting are what you came for.
5. Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree for a gentler, sex-free take on a magical shop as found family.

About Neena Noon

Neena Noon is a Pakistani American writer who was born on Long Island and still lives near the water there, which explains why Little Brook feels so lived in. To Vex & To Hex by Neena Noon is her first book.

• She was edited at St. Martin’s Griffin by Vicki Lame, who acquired the novel.
• Lucy’s Urdu, learned to feel closer to her mother, becomes a private language with Grayson, one of several quiet threads about mixed heritage.
• Her next romance, To Haunt and To Hold, is announced for winter 2027.

The Last Word

To Vex & To Hex by Neena Noon is a generous, flawed and frequently delightful first novel. Its comedy is sharp, its found family is warm, and its hero’s loneliness is written with more care than the genre usually bothers with. Its plot leans on silence where a single text would do, and its sentences repeat themselves when the heat rises. Read it for Lucy behind the counter, magic fizzing at her fingertips, sizing up a customer and knowing exactly which book is waiting for them. Just keep your shoes away from her coffee.