Introduction

Aanii boozhoo kina wiiyaa! I’m back after a break! I know I said beginning of October for my return, but let’s just call it me being on Indian Time, hehe. I’m back with a selection that was published over the time I was gone – it’s very appropriate for my favorite month out of the year. Field of Screams is a debut novel from Wendy Parris for middle grade readers. From the publisher’s site:

Paranormal enthusiast Rebecca Graff isn’t happy about being dragged to Iowa to spend the summer with family she barely knows. But when she tracks a ghostly presence to an abandoned farmhouse, she starts to think the summer won’t be a total lost cause!

The trouble is no one believes her. Then Rebecca finds a note stashed in a comic belonging to her late father—a note that proves the same spirit haunted him when he was twelve. Suddenly she feels a connection to the dad she pretends not to miss, and she is determined to uncover the story behind the haunting.

But the more Rebecca discovers, the scarier the ghost becomes. Soon she is in a race to piece together the puzzle and recover a family legacy before it is lost forever and a horrible tragedy repeats itself.

Publisher’s site

Having grown up in the Midwest, this book was a fun read. Let’s dive into it below.

The Good Stuff

Our main character, Rebecca, is your typical tween: sporty, adventurous, and super-into ghost stories. (Maybe that last one was typical for me.) This book starts off at the beginning of a summer that sees her and her Mom traveling to meet family that Rebecca barely remembers. After she arrives on the family farm in Iowa and meets her late Dad’s family, she learns that there is a whole lot more to her family’s history than she bargained for.

Again, this book was so much fun, y’all. This review will be a shorter one because I finished reading this a while ago, but I still wanted to highlight this NetGalley pick here. I thought at first this was going to be similar to Jacqueline Davis’ The International House of Dereliction, but the tone of this one was quite a bit more serious and pensive. It’s light enough so that middle grade readers will enjoy it, but it doesn’t shy away from the scares, either. The remote rural setting, the tension between Rebecca and her Mom while they deal with their grief; these things make for an excellent story that has a lot of surprisingly touching moments.

In Summary

Kids are big fans of the spooky stuff, and this book is the perfect fit for younger readers for the spooky season. This book is recommended!

Field of Screams is written by Wendy Parris and published by Delacorte Press, a division of Penguin Random House. You can find a link to purchase it here. As always, gichi miigwech for reading!