Not every summer stays sunny.
For Bean, second summers on her grandparents' farm are supposed to feel like coming home. She is a whole year older now, and she is determined to prove it. This time, she can gather the eggs without help, she can hold her own against the meanest rooster in three counties, and she is ready for whatever the season decides to throw at her.
What the season throws at her is more than she bargained for.
Bean spends her days the way farm summers are meant to be spent: outsmarting Duke the rooster in a rematch she is determined to win, learning the patient work of mending fences alongside Grandpa, and falling hopelessly in love with Biscuit, an orphaned baby goat she bottle-feeds and names all by herself. She wades barefoot in the creek, hunts blackberries until her fingers turn purple, catches her first fish, and earns the trust of a wary barn cat one quiet visit at a time. Evenings end the same sweet way they always have, shelling peas on the porch between Grandma and Grandpa as the lightning bugs come out.
Then the sky turns a color Bean has never seen before.
The animals go still and watchful. The creek falls silent. And a storm rolls in unlike anything Bean has ever lived through, one that sends her and her grandparents huddling together in the dark of the root cellar while the wind screams overhead. When morning finally comes and the danger has passed, Bean steps out into a changed world: frogs scattered strangely across the yard, hailstones with rings like a tree trunk, and the beloved old goat pen smashed flat beneath a fallen oak.
But on this farm, even the worst storms carry the seeds of something better. What gets knocked down gets rebuilt, bigger and stronger than before, and Bean learns firsthand that courage was never about not being scared. It was about being scared, and holding on anyway, and trusting the people who hold on right back.
Bean and the Big Storm is a gently thrilling story about the ordinary magic of a farm summer and the extraordinary strength found in family, written with warmth, humor, and just the right amount of nerve for a curious young reader. It captures both the wonder a child feels at a wild, strange storm and the reassurance of knowing that no matter how loud the thunder gets, there is always someone holding your hand in the dark.
Perfect for reading aloud together at bedtime or for a confident young reader taking on their first chapter books, Bean and the Big Storm is the second installment in the Bean Basket Stories series, following Bean's Summer with Grandma and Grandpa. Fans of cozy, character-driven farm stories with real heart will find a new favorite in Bean, a girl brave enough to face a summer storm and grow a little braver because of it.
