This is a beautifully written lyrical novel about the devastation of Reconstruction and the racism entrenched in society beyond emancipation. The characters are complex and the story tragic but also filled with hope- hope beyond what is to what could be. The author paints a beautiful landscape that is highly visual.

It's a quick story! Bane and Leia are getting married at Christmas on the beach! Eva her younger sister who has Down Syndrome is kidnapped. Will Leia and Bane be able to handle the stress of this incident. Who kidnapped and why? It's a great ending to the Aloha Reef Series.

I give the book a 5 star review because the author was really good at making the characters sound real. Also, the book was very suspenseful so it made me want to keep on reading it. This is a great book and I would gladly read it again.

I had a weird feeling about this book as soon as one character saw a boy bleeding to death in a field and decided it was appropriate and normal to refer to him as the "beautiful boy." I kept going, and this book was just not entirely what I thought it was going to be. The expectation here would have been that this book was about finding whoever was responsible for hurting Karel, the boy left to die in the field, but that's really not the point at all. This is more a coming of age story about the three children who found him. Matthew is dealing with his new realization that the world has darkness and is unfair, and that sometimes finding answers doesn't bring you the closure you wanted in life. Zoe has just found out that one of her parents is involved in an affair that she can tell no one about, unless she wants to risk breaking apart her family. On the same vein, she's exploring the idea of love figuring out who she wants to be. Duncan, the youngest, has taken the trauma of finding a dying boy in a new direction - he has realization that, being adopted, now is the time for him to seek out his first mother, before something happens to her.

Incredible book! It gives a context for why we are kept away from learning the truth about our nation's history.

It was a great book and it is full of teamwork. This book was full of adventure and it was full of excitement. I really enjoyed this book because it was about dragons and it was awesome. You should definitely read it if you like dragons as much as I do.

This was a heartbreaking novel that was full of masterful writing, but for whatever reason it just didn't capture my attention. The story mostly centers around Mehar, a woman in 1929 who has just been married. In Mehar's case, however, her marriage ceremony was shared with two other woman who also married into the family, leaving her unsure which man she actually married. She meets her husband only when she is called upon at night, at which point it is so dark she is unable to see him. Though she tries her best to come to a conclusion, she is ultimately unable to determine which of the siblings she has been married off to - until one day when she overhears a conversation and becomes confident in her answer - however, whether she is right or not will have a huge impact on her. I think where the book didn't work for me was due to the inclusion of the other character's storyline. In addition to Mehar, every once in a while there is a chapter that follows a young man who travels to India in 1999 to live with family and try to overcome his heroin addition. These chapters - and the storyline itself - ultimately seemed completely unnecessary. I didn't care about him at all, nor did I really see what he added. I feel like I would have much rather stayed with Mehar the entire time.

Elena Ferrante continues with themes of background, growth, and discovery. The story takes place again in Naples and explores the two worlds of the higher and lower classes. The protagonist, Giovanna, is torn between where she fits in and what is the truth.

It’s a great book so far.…………………………………………….!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BNN nnbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!………….,……:::::

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.