Heartland

Hoffmann, Jilanne. Heartland. 

July 7, 2026 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers 

E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus 

Xyla’s Alkorn family has lived on their family farm near Muscalissa, Iowa, for five generations, but Xyla isn’t enamored with farm life. Her single mother, Cassie, won’t tell her anything about her father, and is always stressed because of the amount of work it takes to run a farm. She not only relies on Xyla’s help, but is constantly expecting her daughter to do work AND be appreciative of the family’s agrarian legacy. Xyla would much rather build Lego models and experiment with clocks, but grudgingly does the work. Sadly, she has few skills and is easily distracted, which often results in loss of saleable crops, furthering her mother’s stress. When she finds a locked box, she is determined to break into it, even getting information from the library on how to pick locks. The library in town requires a one hour round trip, but Xyla loves to be there and hang out with the librarian and his dog. Xyla gets into the box and finds her mother’s journals from 1988, but gets caught reading them. Cassie is angry, and Xyla decides she MUST find out who her father is. Her investigation is put on hold when Cassie rents her grandparents’ house to Lucas DeSoto and his children, Mateo and Alegría. Alegría, whose mother recently died, is Xyla’s age, and Cassie expects Xyla to befriend her. The two actually hit it off, and Alegría is even given a job on the farm for the summer, since her father and brother are working. While the Alkorn’s farm practices organic and sustainable techniques, a nearby hog farm, Porca Miseria, does not. After snooping in her mother’s off, Xyla finds her birth certificate, and uses her mother’s phone to contact Cash Kane, her father, who lives nearby and is an attorney for Porca Miseria. Alegría becomes ill, and has also seen a horrifc spill of sewage from the business, where her father is a manager. Xyla meets up with her father, who gives her a phone she has wanted, but doesn’t act the way she would like about the sewage spill. We’ve seen entries from the mother’s diary about the crisis the family farm faced in the 1980s, which survived because of a return to sustainable practices, and see that while things are still hard in the 2020s, it’s still possible to farm in a responsible way. The ending is moderately upbeat, and there are lots of notes on farming issues since the 1970s. 

Strengths: There are not too many books about children growing up on farms, and it would be nice to see more. There are completely different challenges and joys in this lifestyle, and it would be interesting for young suburban students to see them. Xyla’s dislike of farmwork is essential to her dynamic with her mother, and there are many young readers who have parents who have not been in their lives for various reasons. It’s interesting to read the mother’s diaries (which are in verse), and there are also some chapters that are notes from the farm itself, or are explorations of how time has treated certain subjects. Farming in the 1980s was under attack, and there could be a whole novel just on that topic. 

Weaknesses: Xyla uses a lot of creative epithets, like “batfish farts” and “rat’s bumfuzzle” that seemed overly contrived. There were a lot of complicated issues going on in this book, so some things are treated superficially, like Alegría’s fatty liver problem. This comes in at 432 ages, which may be a challenge for some middle grade readers. 

What I really think: This is a good choice for readers who want to know the joys and sorrows of family farming and who have enjoyed Swore’s The Wish and the Peacock, Berne’s Going Viral (Tween Era), King’s Me and Marvin Gardens or Cline’s Bridge to Bat City. This resonated with me on a personal level. My uncles sold their dairy operations after my grandmother’s death in 1988, so I understand the dynamics of long held family farms facing issues. During that era, I also visited family in Iowa who were tangentially involved in farming (ran corn shellers, lived on family farms that were being rented out, had farming supply businesses) but had moved away from farming because they couldn’t make a go of it. I saw first hand the effects that WalMart had on businesses in small town Iowa. (Muscalissa must be based on Muscatine and Atalissa?) This was the era of Farm Aid, John Cougar Mellencamp’s Scarecrow, and the loss of a plethora of family farms. It was also a time when a lot of Latine immigrants came to rural areas in Iowa to work in the meat packing industry, and the descendents of German immigrants just a generation or two before didn’t always take this well.