A touch of magic helps a girl understand her family's past and improve their future.When 12-year-old Tennessee Lancaster goes to stay in the country for a month with Mimsy, her maternal grandmother, she's making yet another attempt to hold her family together. Their finances are strained to the point where they've just moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Athens, Georgia, that won't hold their family of six, but her mom's relationship with Mimsy is tense, and Tennie fears a return of her mother's depression. Tennie resents her role as peacemaker but is too anxious to let it go. Adding to her burden, whenever Tennie touches something, she risks feeling whatever past emotions are embedded in the item. A budding new friendship in Howler's Hollow with Fox Sanchez-Griffin, who is nonbinary, helps ease her worries over the realization that Mimsy is struggling financially and emotionally too and her misgivings about Mimsy's rich city-slicker beau. But Fox can sense ghosts and has secrets of their own. Van Otterloo's narration gets a bit too folksy sometimes, with similes jammed in like Walmart on Black Friday, but they do well at unfolding the narrative over time. The things Tennie learns through magic lead to a nonmagical and healthy solution to her family's problems. Tennie and her family are White; Fox is cued as having Latinx ancestry, and there is diversity among secondary characters.Heads in unexpected directions and ends satisfyingly. (Fiction. 8-12)