This was the first chapter book I read all by myself and I really liked it. I am going to read the whole Humphrey series and I just got a pet hamster that looks just like Humphrey. My favorite part of the book was when Humphrey and Aldo made friends with each other.

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.

Melissa Henderson used to be a bestselling author, but after the death of her son she has retreated to New England. She puts all of her efforts into fixing up her new home. She has stopped writing and has divorced her husband. During the story, it is revealed her sister is a nun. She wanted to be an actress, but when things didn't work out she ran away and joined a convent. Melissa was upset by this, it is revealed that when she was younger she got pregnant and went to Ireland to deliver her baby. She tried before to find the little girl she delivered but all the records were destroyed. Will her sister Hattie, the nun, help her find her daughter using her connection to the convent. I haven't read a Danielle Steel novel in awhile. It did not disappoint.

After getting into a fight with her roommate and abandoning her at a party, Charlie Jordan has become known on campus as "the girl who let her roommate get murdered." Though few will come out with their blame towards Charlie, the same can't be said for her roommate's family. You see, Charlie was at the party her roommate was last seen at, and she's pretty sure she saw the man who killed her. Unfortunately for Charlie, she has a tendency to get lost in her thoughts and hallucinate, so she's not sure what the man actually looked like - just what the figment of her imagination looked like, and he was something out of a Hollywood movie. Unable to deal with the guilt of being useless in the investigation, Charlie decides to use the local ride board to hitch a ride off campus and go home. Cue Josh Baxter, who just so happened to be at the board at the exact same time, and who is going in the same exact direction as Charlie needs to go. It seems like a perfect match! Unfortunately for Charlie, the further along the ride she goes, the more certain she is that the man she's with is not actually Josh Baxter. And he's probably not actually going to where she needs to go. And he seems to know things about her roommate's murder that he shouldn't know, things that were never released to the public. Stuck in the car with him for the rest of the night, Charlie has to do whatever it will take to survive. This is a great quick read, but there's nothing really spectacular about it. The main character getting "movies in her mind" was kind of weird and didn't really seem necessary to the plot at all. I really loved the idea of this book, but the execution of it wasn't there. It's definition something I couldn't put down, but it's not something I'd be likely to remember in a year.

This book is based on the premise that the solidarity dividend is when folks come together across racial lines benefits society as a whole. It is a dense book written mostly from an economical standpoint which surmises that the cost of racism and white supremacy hurts not only Black people but white people as well.

How To Spy On A Shark was a good book. It tells the story of a team of marine biologists who go out to sea to study Mako Sharks. They catch, tag and release one mako shark and then follow it with a special robot that they can track the shark on. Pretty cool!

I expected this book to be a light beach read but it was actually more complex. I enjoyed the writing and how each chapter was from a different characters point of view. I also liked the way the timeline was organized and how it all came together in the end.

This is very much more of a character-driven story, and a character-exploration story, rather than a page turning, thrilling mystery novel. The main character, Anna, has just recently returned home after suffering a family tragedy and being kicked out by her husband. A detective who specializes in missing children, Anna's hometown has long haunted her as a girl she went to school with went missing in a still-unsolved case. Just as she returns, as it happens, another girl has gone missing - and Anna very quickly finds herself involved in solving the case. As she does so, her past trauma comes to light and becomes a force she will need to deal with if she is going to find Cameron and return to her family. I didn't really find this to be a page turner. In fact, it took me a while to get past the first section, because it's really just setting the stage and nothing much happens. I finally sat down and just plowed through the book in a day. It wasn't bad, but everything felt kind of flat and I didn't really care about Anna as a character. Even as she cried about the unknown trauma she had experienced, I never felt myself dying to know what had happened to her that led to her husband kicking her out. I just didn't care. I also don't love using real-life cases in a fictional story. It just felt exploitive and gross to me. Polly was a real girl who underwent something terrible, as did her family, and using it as some form of entertainment just doesn't sit right with me. Especially when you're going to make it a big piece of your plot, with your character investigating her bedroom and listening to a psychic talk about her.

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.

A very exciting book. Has many humorous elements but once again I wish it was more in depth.