Ten-year-old Cuban American Rafa Alvarez and his friends Beto and Yesi, who are obsessed with the fantasy tabletop role-playing game The Forgotten Age, take the adventure out of doors and into the real world in this boisterous telling by Cuevas (Cuba in My Pocket). When a prank they pull as part of their game goes wrong, Rafa’s father sends him from Florida to New Mexico, to spend a month helping Marcus Coleman, an old college friend, run Rancho Espanto—Terror Ranch. There, Rafa meets Marcus, a Black Army veteran turned barn manager, and affable Korean American Jennie Kim, the snack-obsessed daughter of the local librarian. Rafa slowly acclimates to the ranch’s sedate lifestyle, which helps him process his mother’s worsening cancer. But a stranger in a green jacket, believing the ranch to be haunted, pressures him to leave, even going so far as to frame Rafa for vandalism around the ranch, which puts the youth at odds with his new friends. Via Rafa’s vulnerable first-person narration, Cuevas crafts a whirlwind mystery populated by a compassionate community of lovable characters with effervescent personalities, to explore themes of grief, healing, and PTSD with tenderness and well-timed humor. Ages 8–12. (Apr.)

Gr 3–7 —In this intriguing paranormal fantasy-mystery, 12-year-old Cuban American Rafael "Rafa" and his best friends' harebrained scheme to steal their school's slushy machine lands them in trouble. Rafa is banished from Miami to a Santa Fe, NM, ranch for the summer that's an artists' retreat, a scientists' research center, and potentially haunted. His first day there Rafa sees cows in the canyon that no one else seems to see, and a strange man who tells Rafa that he shouldn't be there. Assigned to help Black barn manager Marcus, a military vet, Rafa is blamed when the horses escape the corral. With help from his only peer on the ranch—purple-braided, talkative Korean American Jennie Kim, daughter of the ranch librarian—Rafa investigates some very odd and inexplicable incidents. Jennie tells him about the outlaw cattle-rustling brothers who lived in the canyon in the 1800s and reputedly still haunt it. They suspect one of brothers' ghosts is behind these strange occurrences. Their investigation leads them into a dangerous and otherworldly paradox. Beyond the story's scary, mysterious, and humorous aspects, it sensitively explores the characters' invisible scars from illness, PTSD, death, grief, and anxiety. VERDICT The emotional resonance for readers in this appealing story is in how Rafa and other characters come to terms with transformative events in their lives in a very real and relatable way.—Sharon Rawlins