Moving from one season into another isn’t unlike traveling to different countries: As landscapes and weather patterns shift, so do our habits and thought processes. Now that autumn is upon us, I want to look at four wonderfully immersive otherworlds that circle around ideas of magically controlled environments and the free wills that resist them.

C. L. Polk’s WITCHMARK (Tor.com, paper, $15.99) is set a few degrees slant of an early-20th-century Europe where witchcraft is real but practiced only by a secretive upper class of weather-controlling mages. The nations of Aeland and Laneer have recently concluded a war in Aeland’s favor, and Dr. Miles Singer, a military surgeon living in Aeland’s capital, tends wounded soldiers while investigating the terrible affliction that makes them dissociate and murder their families once released into their care. One day a stranger brings a dying civilian into Miles’s hospital who claims he’s been poisoned; before he dies, the man begs Miles to find the party responsible.

But Miles has his own secrets to manage. In addition to being a witch in danger of being incarcerated if found out, he’s also a noble on the run from his powerful family: His father wants to see him live as an external power source for his older sister’s magic, instead of allowing Miles to develop his own healing gifts. Uncertain whom to trust, Miles navigates a tightening web of intrigues, bicycle chases and romance.

“Witchmark” is thoroughly charming and deftly paced; I appreciated how well the world-building meshed with the plot’s development, like a map’s surface being revealed in time with one’s progress along it. That said, I wanted more from its female characters, especially Grace, Miles’s sister. While the male leads were well-developed, their attraction to each other engagingly realized, I found the women were limited to their roles in the story. In Grace’s case this was especially frustrating, as the plot requires her to be ally or antagonist from beat to beat without giving readers a clear sense of her as a person — and while her motivations are supposed to be opaque, they often come across as arbitrary.