Read A Fall for Friendship free in the Little Reads app.
Megan Atwood's A Fall for Friendship is a cosy autumn mystery for 9 year olds about a girl who's quite sure ghosts aren't real, and friends who'd love her to stop saying so.
Olive likes facts. Zombies? Scientifically impossible. Ghosts? No such thing. River parasites? Now THOSE are worth being scared of.
The trouble is that Olive, her twin brother Peter and their friends Lizzie and Sarah are helping put on a zombie hayride and a haunted barn at Lizzie's family orchard. Everyone else is having a brilliant spooky time. And every time Olive points out that none of it's real, the others get a little bit cross with her.
Then things start going wrong in the barn. A man who owns the hardware store keeps hammering his own thumb. Something slides off a table onto somebody's foot. Sarah's mum rolls right out of the hayloft (into soft hay, luckily). And Lizzie's dramatic teenage sister, Gloria, announces that the orchard is haunted.
Olive isn't having any of it. But how else do you explain it all?
Reading this is a lot like being Olive. You can see she's right, and you can also see exactly why her brother wishes she'd let it go. Being the odd one out in your own group of friends is such a real feeling, and lots of kids will probably recognise it.
It's a lovely small-town book too. The whole town turns up to help build the haunted barn, from the sheriff (who gets punched on the chin by Sarah for sneaking up on her) to the antiques lady who threatens everyone with one of her poems. Gloria yells "ACTING!" whenever anyone mentions acting.
The haunted barn plans are a bit gruesome in places. There's a clown room, a chainsaw murderer and some bloody ghost schoolchildren, and Gloria's ghost story includes a nasty farm accident. It's all make-believe, but a very jumpy reader might want to know.
It's the third book about this group of friends, though it makes perfect sense on its own.
If they'd like another spooky mystery with plenty of laughs, try The Great Ghost Hoax, where a gang of pets sets out to investigate when a neighbour is sure her rental flat is haunted.
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