The Whispering Chimney

   Eleven-year-old Bethany’s life implodes when her mother buys a farm in West Virginia. In the move, Bethany loses her supportive grandmother, her best friends, and the excitement of living in a bustling Ohio town. At the small school she is forced to attend, the sixth-grade girls are friendly at first. Then, led by a domineering girl named Marsha, the girls turn on her, teasing and taunting. Now Bethany is stuck. In the middle of nowhere. With no friends, no new big middle school, no movies, no grandmother.

   Then comes the day she trudges up the ridge above their farm and discovers the ruins of an old cabin. Moss covered rocks reveal the outlines of another life—one that also shattered, but centuries ago. Bethany sits on the hearth stone of a chimney.  Whispers from the stones tell a tale of tenderness and catastrophe. Frightened, curious, she struggles to unearth what really happened on that lonely hill. How will that story change her own forever?

 Middle grade fiction. 48,000 words.