I liked this book even though it was a little sad. It was sad when the girl's family died. It made me want to cry. I thought it was cool that the flea got his super strength from drinking a lion's blood. I would recommend this book to my friends and family.

Second book in the Rock Harbor series. I will finish the series by the end of July. This is an easy read and flows nicely from the first book. I love the characters. I feel like I know the characters and easily find myself engrossed in their lives. This book deals with Bree and her son, whom she found in the first book, alive after a year. Someone breaks into her lighthouse and is searching for something. She and her dog Sampson need to protect her son and find out what they are looking for.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. In school, while we covered the battles of WWII in great depth, Japanese internment camps were never really discussed in detail. Although a bit jarring at first, I liked following multiple characters (a different one each chapter) through their lives and learning about their unique struggles. All the kids are around each other for the most part, so we still see mostly the same characters but the chapter is just not told from their perspective. Although it would have been very long (maybe in another book?), I would have liked to return to some characters’ perspectives which I felt could have been developed a bit more. Honestly, I even cried one chapter but laughed in others.

I'm clearly missing something with this book, because the entire time I read it all I kept thinking was "there is no way this author is an actual human being." The book takes place over the span of 11 years. In most chapters, we follow Kate and Meredith, two neighbors living in a town where a woman named Shelby has just gone missing. Meredith, a doula with two children named Delilah and Leo, has started receiving threatening text messages from an unknown number. Shortly after, her and her daughter disappear. The book centers around what was going on with Meredith prior to her disappearance, with Kate providing insight into what happened after she disappeared. Set eleven years later, there are also chapters from Leo's point of view, where we get to see what it's like to have your sister suddenly return after being gone for eleven years. There are just so many reasons why this book didn't work at all. The biggest of them all is that it is poorly written. As an example of what you can expect, this is how the author thinks someone would describe potentially seeing figures outside of a house a few weeks before the occupants went missing - "It was dark out," Cassandra says, "a moonless night. The streetlight outside has been out a month or two. My husband, Marty, called the city about it a while ago, but it still hasn't been fixed. Our tax dollars...hard at work. The only light came from whatever porch lights were left on overnight." Yeah. Because when my neighbor turns up missing and I think I may have seen some strange figures skulking about their house, I'm definitely going to be remembering that it was a moonless night. Everyone else in the book is just as poor at their job. The pathologist couldn't correctly figure out how someone died. The police openly lied about evidence and just sort of hoped no one would ever question them or figure it out. A woman running a daycare is completely unaware of the abuse happening there - and then the mother just doesn't even care?? Who finds out their kid is being abused and is just like "eh, I better send them back the next day or they'll get soft." Are there no other daycares?? The final thing I'll mention is that the ending is completely bonkers. I guess if you're going to commit murder, this is the town to do it in - apparently no one is ever around to watch people murder people and then drag their bodies into their cars.

One of the best books I have ever read!

This is a very slow-paced book about a sibling relationship. I do not feel like the synopsis did this book justice as I was expecting something different. The plot was lacking substance for me in general. Overall, it was an okay book that I wouldn't re-read.

A more somber, but beautifully executed story of Juliet Browning and her romantic relationship while studying art in Venice during the Second World War. Some heartbreak, some inspiration, woven between 1938 and 2011. Caroline Grant, the grand niece of ‘Lettie’ embarks on a trip to solve the mystery of a sketchbook. Different from Bowen’s quirky and lighthearted Georgie romps.

A gripping mystery that takes place in England in the Agatha Christie style where each character and possible suspect is examined, revealed, and investigated. Three women are joined in a cabin to study the fauna and flora of the surrounding woods so that a business owning a mine can have permission to expand without disturbing the environment.

I've read many Lisa Jewell books and consider myself a fan. She does a great job of creating a realistic and vivid picture of her characters and their lives, and I usually enjoy following along as she tells their stories and gradually puts pieces together to solve a mystery or a puzzle of some kind. This book felt like Lisa Jewell "light," and read more like a romance novel. The book alternates between the lives of two young women making their way in London 70 years apart - Betty in the 1990s and Betty's step-grandmother Arlette in the 1920s. Both of them are extraordinarily beautiful, and other characters comment on this so often that it starts to seem ridiculous. I liked the story of Betty more than that of Arlette, but overall the characters in both time periods were flat, their problems were predictable and the book dragged on way too long. I had to force myself to finish it.

Honestly, I just found this really boring? There was nothing novel about the storyline or the characters, and I didn't care about what happened at all. Set in a small neighborhood were everyone knows each other, the story takes place 14 months after Ruby Fletcher, a girl who rented a room in one of the houses, was convicted of killing two neighbors. With her conviction overturned, Ruby reappears in town determined to get revenge on everyone who turned against her. Everyone in town, in turn, is determined to completely ignore her until she leaves. Maybe it was because the victims were dead before the novel started, and were clearly disliked by everyone in the community anyway? There was no real reason to feel anything - and that goes for all of the characters. The narrator is really unreliable and wishy-washy, and her building the case of what happened at the end was illogical and would never hold up any weight in court. The rest of the neighborhood also seems like it's filled with jerks. It was just a very lackluster read, unfortunately.