Young Betty, who has pale skin, blue eyes, and short blond hair, is a master of putting off bedtime, and she knows just the thing that will keep her mother engaged: “Can we talk about the Apple Festival?” she asks. It’s just the prompt her mother needs to discuss the wonders of the real-world Murphysboro Apple Festival. There’s a pie contest that the mother always enters in honor of Grandma Betty, tons of apple treats and corn dogs, and a parade led by Captain Applesauce that features bands, floats, and a little bit of candy. But best of all, the festival makes Betty’s family feel close to the people who have come before and who are no longer with them. Cappel describes the festival with evident love, and the characters’ enthusiasm for the pageants and food is contagious. Occasional complex sentence structures (“A big girl, she liked to do things by herself”) may give newly independent readers pause. Maloney’s mixed-media illustrations highlight the charm of traditions from earlier eras carried on into modern times, but the nearly identical repetition of Betty’s face, which appears almost copied and pasted, can feel jarring. Endnotes discuss the long history of the real festival in Murphysboro, Illinois.