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.

This book had active action and suspense. It is a good idea, and a good book for certain people.

Book 2 of Kamigawa Cycle is amazing!

This book is about a family in the Jim Crow south. It centers around the story of a mother and daughter and the generational trauma of slavery and how it is perpetuated. Mental illness, abuse, and racism are heavy themes. While the book is set in the 1950s in a different era, there are clear connections to the present day.

I liked this book at first. Lori Gottlieb has an interesting background and she writes well about the patients she treats and her own sessions in therapy. But this book was way too long - the short chapters jump around among these different stories and after a while I lost interest. Also, since Gottlieb combined and changed many parts of her patients' stories in order to protect their privacy, it was easy to get distracted wondering what was real and what was fiction.

This is a historical fiction about a family who begin life in war torn Spain in the 1930s and are transported to Chile (which is the long petal of the sea in the title). It follows not only their lives but also several other families who come and go throughout their lives. It is quite interesting and has made me want to research both the Spanish Civil War and Chile in greater detail.

This book is very eerie. It is a dystopian novel about memory. The citizens are on an island and things disappear mysteriously. The Memory Police take people away and the main characters work to try to preserve their things and memories against all odds.

Dog Man Unleashed is about dog man being the worst dog in the beginning and the best dog at the end. There is also a villain called Petey that made a flat paper copy of himself, which turned to life. This all happened on Chief's birthday.

I loved the book and everything in it. It was one of the best books I have read. There were very interesting plot twists, and I really enjoyed all of the new characters being introduced throughout the story. I cannot wait for the next book coming out in October.

This book is by a woman for women. It is about feminism and being the person you were meant to be, not the one society tells you to be. It is a memoir about one woman’s journey through this process and the lessons she learned along the way. Fast read!