Dream
by Barbara O’Connor
Intermediate    Farrar    256 pp.
8/25    9780374392949    $17.99
e-book ed.  9780374392932    $10.99

O’Connor takes readers back to Colby, North Carolina, in this standalone companion to Wish (rev. 11/16). Eleven-year-old Idalee Lovett, descended from a long line of musicians, stars here. An aspiring country songwriter, Idalee lives with her mother in their family home, now converted into a boardinghouse whose lodgers include several distinct and well-developed secondary characters. When Joey’s All-American BBQ Shack announces a song-writing contest, with the winning song to be performed on the radio by a rising country singer, Idalee is all in. She figures her chances of winning would be better if she could purchase a guitar. Without the funds to do so, Idalee enlists Charlie and Howard (who will be familiar to readers of Wish) as well as temporary boarder Odell to find her grandfather’s bounty, rumored to be hidden somewhere in her home. The treasure turns out to be a collection of never-published, and terrific, country songs, which fill Idalee with self-doubt about her own skills and present her with a moral dilemma: perhaps she could just enter one of these gems. But such a move would belie her song, “Dream,” in which Idalee eschews gold and riches for life’s everyday pleasures. In a leisurely narrative that reflects the small-town atmosphere of Colby, O’Connor gives readers much to ponder.

From the September/October 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.