FIELD OF SCREAMS

Ghosts and a family secret haunt this middle-grade novel.

Twelve-year-old Rebecca is reluctantly traveling with her mom from Chicago to visit her paternal uncle’s family. When her father died six years ago, Uncle Jon’s family lived in Seattle, but they have since moved to Iowa. Now, Uncle Jon and Aunt Sylvie want to reestablish a closer family connection. They’ve offered Rebecca’s mother a quiet place to work on her Ph.D. Rebecca will be babysitting her 2-year-old cousin, Justin, but she’d much rather be going to summer camp with her best friend, Jenna. As a parting gift, Jenna gave Rebecca a book titled Heart-Stopping Heartland Hauntings; ghosts and ghost stories are a fascination of Rebecca’s, something she shared with her late father. Maybe, she hopes, the house in Iowa will be haunted. This competently plotted story includes many genre staples—a tween crush, flawed adults, a mean girl with a backstory, and even treasure of a sort. The writing, however, lacks confident originality and relies on standard tropes and metaphors (e.g., thunderstorms frequently presage ghostly encounters). The plot explores family themes around birth, death, and divorce but eschews deeper nuances that could lift it from ordinary to extraordinary. Nevertheless, it is interesting enough and likely to sustain the interest of younger readers in particular. Characters are cued White.

Solid but lacking distinctive flair.