The Real Rhythm of Rural Life During WWI - an Editorial Review of "One Summer at Helgeveld Farm"

Book Blurb:

In 1949, Will Parlor glimpses a woman across a crowded Chicago street and is carried back to the summer that changed him forever. In 1917, at seventeen, he took a job as a worker on an Illinois farm. There, he’s drawn into the Dutch-American Helgeveld family, especially daughters Vlinder and Corrie.

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 in 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.

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Author Bio:

John Blois is the author of One Summer at Helgeveld Farm, a coming-of-age historical novel set in 1917 Illinois that explores friendship, family, race, cultural touchstones, and promises made across generations. The novel explores Midwestern history and Dutch-American heritage and gives a picture of the quiet resilience of farm life, the complexities of identity, and the enduring power of love and community.

His work blends historical research and captures the voices of disperse characters in a time of war, loss, and unexpected joy. With a background in storytelling, writing, and personal history projects, John brings a human touch to his fiction.

John lives in Maine, where he has two sons and teaches writing and Comparative Religions at a local community college. He continues writing and researching stories connected to the Helgeveld family and the changing American landscape of the early 20th century. A companion novel regarding the Helgeveld family and characters in the first novel is in the works.

Editorial Review:

There are books that do not so much tell a story as open a door—quietly, as if by a draught—and suddenly one finds oneself stepping into a chamber half-lit by memory. So it is with John Blois’s One Summer at Helgeveld Farm, a novel whose very first breath carries the scent of hayfields long vanished, and whose pages seem to ripple with the tremor of years returning upon themselves.

It begins, fittingly, with a glimpse—no more than a shadow flitting across a Chicago street in 1949. Yet to Will Parlor, that solitary figure is enough to loosen the delicate threads of time. In an instant, the careful scaffolding of adulthood wavers, and he is once more seventeen, standing on the soft Illinois earth of 1917, when the world was younger, though already trembling beneath the machinery of a coming war.

The farm to which he returns in his mind—Helgeveld, with its Dutch rhythms and its orderly, wind-swept rows—is rendered not as a museum piece but as something living, almost breathing. One hears the wooden wagons groaning in the laneways even as, far off, the new automobiles cough and sputter into modernity. Blois ushers the reader into this threshold between ages so gently, so unassumingly, that one hardly notices the moment of crossing. The present dissolves; the past gathers itself around us like a shawl.

But the truest pull of the novel is not the land itself, nor even the girl at its heart—Vlinder Helgeveld, whose quiet grace infuses the air around her like the shimmer of wings her name suggests. It is the company of young men who, for one summer, share a portion of life’s turning: Will, uncertain and observant; Owen, tender as uncut wheat; Elmer, marked by his difference; Roy, all bristling tempests; and Isaiah and Moses Butler, who have come north from Alabama carrying both the burden of their country’s divisions and the unquenchable spark of their own hope.

How delicately Blois sketches them—never with the rigidity of portraiture, but with the shifting, luminous quality of boys caught between childhood and the long shadow of responsibility. They quarrel with the fierce loyalty of brothers; they laugh with that reckless intensity known only to youth; they shoulder misfortune—an injury, a broken wheel, the small catastrophes of farm life—with a courage that seems to arise not from heroism but from the simple fact of being together.

Among them all, it is Moses who glows brightest, as if some inner lantern had been lit. His songs drift through the chapters, warm and mischievous, unbowed even by the sharp inequities that greet him at every turn—such as the cold refusal of a bank clerk’s hand, which opens an account for one boy but not another. Blois does not grandstand these cruelties; instead, he allows them to pulse quietly beneath the surface, a reminder of the nation’s fault lines running even through this pastoral corner of Illinois.

The farm itself, with its sycamores and poplars whispering century-old stories, becomes not merely a setting but a witness—observing, sheltering, remembering. Beneath its branches lie the histories of those who carved a life from the soil, who endured, who hoped. Blois renders the land as a living archive, binding all who pass through it into a single, breathing lineage.

What astonishes most is the way tenderness threads through the darker weave of the tale. The world in 1917 is shifting—toward war, toward mechanization, toward a future that feels both promising and perilous. Yet within this uncertain hour, there are pockets of light: shared labor that dissolves class and colour, unexpected bravery, the hush of evening when grief loosens its grip and something like solace steals in. Blois captures these fleeting illuminations with a sensitivity that feels almost Woolfian—attentive to the quiet, interior quivers that shape a human life far more than any grand event.

By the time Will Parlor returns to himself—to that Chicago pavement, that passing figure—the reader has walked with him through a landscape both intimate and immense. The summer has ended, yet its echo lingers, as all formative seasons do, vibrating somewhere deep in the chest.

One Summer at Helgeveld Farm is not merely a coming-of-age novel; it is a meditation on memory’s peculiar fidelity, on the way a single season can press its outline upon a lifetime. In Blois’s hands, the past does not recede—it glimmers. And long after the final page is turned, one feels its light still flickering, like the last gleam on a field at dusk.

Five Stars from The Historical Fiction Company and the “Highly Recommended” award of excellence.

Award:

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