Amy's Haunted House

Susan Meyers's Always Friends Club series captures middle-grade social life with more warmth and word-level craft than many nostalgia picks from the mid-1990s. In this installment, Amy's haunted house contest idea collides with the far more terrifying prospect of asking her crush Mark Sanchez for help — and the genuine tension is less about the haunted house and more about the social courage required to reach out. The friendship dynamics between Cricket, Meg, Brittany, and Amy feel real for the 9-to-12 audience. The honest caveats: this is largely out of print, the review base is thin, and finding a copy takes effort. For readers who do track it down, the writing is better than its obscurity suggests. A worthwhile mid-grade discovery for fans of friendship-first stories.