One Summer at Helgeveld Farm

"A compulsively readable feel-good novel and an impressively written debut."
— Kirkus Starred Review, featured in February 2026 issue

"Full of warmth, tenderness and love… a journey back in time and a rich experience of life in rural Illinois in the early 1900s."
— Reedsy Discovery (5★, Lorraine Cobcroft, March 2026)

In 1949, Will Parlor spots a familiar silhouette across a busy Chicago street. In that moment, he is carried back to the summer of 1917, when, at seventeen, he took a job as a worker on an Illinois farm. Over that summer, he grew close to the Dutch-American Helgeveld family, especially daughters Vlinder and Corrie.

At the farm, Will also befriends Moses and Isaiah Butler, African American brothers up from Alabama, seeking freedom and opportunity in an America still rumbling after the Civil War. Together they navigate the racial and social tensions of a country on the brink of transformation.

Will falls in love with Vlinder, but a sudden tragedy threatens the harvest and the future of the farm. Despite a promise to return the next year, misfortune and family duty keep him home in Pittsburgh.

Thirty-two years later, that chance encounter on a Chicago street rekindles the summer that shaped his life and brings back the love, the loss, and the weight of promises he made in youth.

Set against the backdrop of a changing America during World War I, One Summer at Helgeveld Farm is a coming-of-age historical novel that travels alongside a forgotten piece of early twentieth-century America: a time when automobiles and horse-drawn wagons battled for space on city streets, and where families faced war, grief, and the stirrings of social change.

One Summer at Helgeveld Farm is rich with period detail and told with emotional warmth, humor, and quiet resilience. It invites readers into the rhythms of rural life and into the lives of those searching for purpose in a country edging forward.