Note: This post contains affiliate links. This book fits in the following 2022 Reading Challenges: Let me know if you remember a kids' book from that era about a young girl (much like Katie John!) exploring the rural area around her new home who finds an old pioneer house and looks for clues to imagine the life of the woman who lived there. My only complaint was not with this wonderful novel but with my own memory because while I enjoyed reading it again, it was not the book I remembered it was! Now I have no idea what that book in my memory was. And I think that today's kids will still enjoy Katie John's adventures. It paints a portrait of childhood summer fun with a best friend, of the kind that I hope kids today can still experience (I know my sons did). Katie John and her family run into some challenges, financially and otherwise, and there is some suspense here and there, but overall, the book has a light, fun tone. Katie John is a very likable heroine and is quite a bit like me as a child! Her summer experiences with her new best friend, Sue, reminded me of my own adventures with my best friend, Michelle, though we were in a modern suburban neighborhood.

I can see why I liked this book so much as a kid and why it left such an impression on me. Little by little, Katie John comes to love the small town and the big house and even comes up with a great idea for saving the house. Over the course of the summer, their friendship deepens as they explore the house, set up a business, and solve mysteries about the house and the area. Although the girls are quite different-Sue cautious and timid and Katie John impulsive and bold-they soon become best friends.

That sends the two girls on a series of investigations into the mysteries of the old place. Then Katie John meets Sue, a girl her own age from down the street, who tells her that her aunt's house is haunted. Her father is busy writing his book, and her mother is trying to sell the house so they can move to New York in the fall. At first, Katie hates the old house, cluttered with dust and old-fashioned furniture, and the town, where she knows no one. Her great-aunt died and left them her old, large house that's been in the family for one hundred years. Ten-year-old Katie John and her mother and father have moved from California to a small town on the Mississippi River in Missouri.

I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting this old favorite about a high-spirited young girl adjusting to small-town life and having adventures with her new best friend. It's a book I remembered loving as a child, though I rarely (never?) hear anyone else mention it or its two sequels. which, of course, is still on my shelf! Katie John by Mary Calhoun was published in 1960. One of the prompts for Middle-Grade March was a book published before I was born, so I thought I would re-read one of my childhood favorites.