The Giant Pumpkin Gambit
A Novel

About this book:

Sixteen-year-old Maeve Miller has one shot to save her family's Ohio farm: grow a thousand-pound pumpkin in four months. The prize money at the Tri-State Weigh-Off covers the bank's foreclosure deadline. The competition? Rayna Vance—wealthy, brilliant, armed with a climate-controlled greenhouse, automated fertigation, and a genetic pedigree engineered for world records. Maeve has her father's rusted tractor, two hundred years of river-bottom topsoil, and a notebook full of hand-written calculations.

As the summer blisters toward October, the rivalry shifts from the patch to the personal. Late-night irrigation runs become stakeouts. Seed swaps turn into intelligence operations. And when sabotage strikes the vines, Maeve discovers Rayna's polished confidence cracks under pressures no spreadsheet can predict. Between them grows something neither expected: a grudging respect that feels dangerously like attraction, rooted in the same stubborn dirt they're both fighting to master.

*The Giant Pumpkin Gambit* is a high-stakes coming-of-age novel where agricultural science meets family survival, where first love blooms alongside prize-winning genetics, and where the weight on the scale in October measures more than just a pumpkin—it measures everything a girl is willing to grow into.