The club members tackle friendship, mean girls, and L.M. Montgomery in this second book in the acclaimed Mother-Daughter Book Club middle grade series—now with a fresh, cozy new look! Anne Shirley (of Anne of Green Gables ) says that kindred spirits are not scarce. But when the mothers invite snooty Becca Chadwick and her overbearing mother to join their book club, Emma, Jess, Cassidy, and Megan find that claim sorely tested. But they have a bigger problem when Jess finds out her family may have to give up their farm. In a year filled with skating parties, disastrous camping trips, and high-stakes fashion shows, the girls realize it’s only through working together—Becca included—that they can save Half Moon Farm. Heather Vogel Frederick is the award-winning author of the Mother-Daughter Book Club series, the Pumpkin Falls Mystery series, the Patience Goodspeed books, the Spy Mice series, and Once Upon a Toad . An avid fan of small towns like Pumpkin Falls, Heather and her husband live in New England, close to where Heather grew up. You can learn more about the author and her books at HeatherVogelFrederick.com. 1. Megan Megan “Well, this is a pretty kettle of fish.” —Anne of Green Gables “What are you girls up to out there?” I swear all mothers have radar that doesn’t quit. “Nothing, Mom!” Jess calls back, motioning frantically to Emma and me. Giggling, the two of us scoop up the evidence—garlic powder, cinnamon, peppermint extract, and blue food coloring—and hastily stuff it back into the spice cupboard. “Doesn’t sound like nothing to me.” We hear Mrs. Delaney’s chair scrape on the dining room floor as she pushes back from the table and comes to the kitchen to investigate. Emma and I quickly wipe the grins off our faces. Jess leans back casually against the counter, blocking our concoction from view. “Hmmm,” says Mrs. Delaney, scanning the kitchen suspiciously. She spots the open spice cupboard and lifts an eyebrow. “Uh, we were thinking of baking cookies,” Jess explains, which isn’t technically a lie even though we decided not to because the kitchen is sweltering. Normally, any of our mothers would have seen through this in a flash, but Mrs. Delaney seems kind of distracted today. She shakes her head and sighs. “Please don’t bake anything, girls, it’s hot enough in here already without turning the oven on. We’ve got peppermint ice cream—you can have some of that if you want a snack.” She opens the freezer and sticks her head inside. “A day like today kind of makes you wish it was winter, doesn’t it?” “Or that we had air conditioning,” says Jess mournfully. Mrs. Delaney pulls her head out again and gives her a sympathetic smile. “Maybe someday, honey. Right now we have other priorities.” She looks over at Emma. The smile disappears. “Emma Hawthorne, you must be roasting in that turtleneck! Didn’t you offer her a T-shirt, Jess?” Jess looks uncomfortable. “Uh—” “I forgot to bring something to change into after school, and nothing of Jess’s fits me, Mrs. Delaney,” Emma replies matter-of-factly, patting her tummy. Emma is a little on the plump side, and Jess is really petite. “Well, for Pete’s sake, you should have said something,” Mrs. Delaney tells her. “We have plenty of things around here that will work for you. Hang on a sec.” She trots upstairs. As soon as her mother is out of sight, Jess grabs the jar of blue liquid from the counter behind her and sticks it in her T-shirt pocket. I glance over at Emma. Emma is one of my best friends, but she’s not exactly the fashion queen of Concord, Massachusetts. I mean, I like to dress up for the first day of school too, but a turtleneck on a day like this? You’d think she’d know by now that the beginning of September is pretty much still summer everywhere, except maybe Alaska. At least she picked a good color. Purple goes well with her brown eyes and curly brown hair. And it matches her new lavender glasses, too. Mrs. Delaney reappears and tosses Emma a white T-shirt with a HeartBeats logo on it. “Try this,” she says. HeartBeats is the soap opera that Mrs. Delaney was on last year. You’d never guess by looking at her now that she’s an actress. When we visited her in New York this past summer, she was all glamorous. Now—well, now she looks the way she always did. Today, for instance, she’s wearing jeans and a faded Red Sox T-shirt. She’s still pretty and everything—really pretty, just like Jess, with the same sparkly blue eyes, though Mrs. Delaney’s hair is dark, not blond like Jess’s—but she looks ordinary, too. Like a mom. I wonder if she misses all the makeup and clothes and stuff from her acting job. I sure would. But Mrs. Delaney seems really happy to be back home at Half Moon Farm. “How’s your mom doing, Megan?” she asks me. “We missed her yesterday at yoga class.” “She just got elected to the board of the Concord Riverkeepers,” I tell her. “Yesterday was their first meeting.” My mother’s kind of a nature fre