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. (Paranormal. 9-12)

Armed with her copy of Heart-Stopping Heartland Hauntings, paranormal-obsessed 12-year-old Rebecca Graff travels with her mother from Chicago to Iowa to stay with Rebecca’s uncle Jon and his family in the same place her late—and rarely discussed—father spent his summers. Though she’s not thrilled to be away from her best friend, Rebecca hopes that she’ll finally encounter a ghost while exploring her eerie rural surroundings, especially when she learns that her dad was also fascinated by all things supernatural. Following an unsettling experience in an abandoned nearby farmhouse, Rebecca becomes convinced that there is a ghostly presence trying to communicate with her and determines to uncover the spirit’s secrets despite jeers from mean girl Kelsie, whose family owns the dilapidated property. The discovery of a creepy photograph and diary from the early 1900s, as well as her dad’s notes on his own spectral encounters, sets the tween on an expedition to unravel the mystery with the assistance of cute local boy Nick. Though some story elements feel overly convenient, Rebecca’s desire for connection to the father she barely knew—particularly in her emotionally withdrawn mother’s absence—lends a note of poignancy to the steadily paced scares in Parris’s atmospheric debut. Characters default to white. Ages 8–12. Agent: Karyn Fischer, BookStop Literary. (Aug.)