A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

The broad-rangingness of this request makes it difficult to fulfill! I will play it safe and begin with an author: Frances Hardinge, whose books (I've read two so far; she's published four) remind me more than anything else I've read of the darker end of Diana Wynne Jones. Fly By Night is the first book of hers I read, and if I shelved my books by plot-themed association I'd put it next to Dalemark and Westmark. It's witty, intelligent, complex, interesting in worldbuilding, highly concerned with the character development of a suspicious and angry child among scheming and untrustworthy adults, and occasionally too proud of its own cleverness but given it's a first novel I forgive it that. Well Witched, her second book, looks by the cover as if it ought to be more twee, but is in fact significantly creepier and much less interested in its own cleverness and even more interested in the complex character development of highly flawed children and adults. It's about three kids who are given the responsibility of granting other people's wishes and specific creepy powers with which to accomplish this. Everything, unsurprisingly, goes very wrong very fast, but the real emphasis of the story is on the ability that passive, damaged, or unlikeable people have to change and strengthen themselves.