J.J. Howard

{My thoughts} – Emma is a sweet girl that has an adorable pug named Cupid. Cupid is well known by most the town and allowed in places of business that wouldn’t otherwise allow pets.

Emma has a best friend named Theo and another named Hallie. They have been really close friends for a long time and mostly know everything about one another.

It takes Emma sometime to figure out she’d fallen out of step with both in regards to the pages of this book. However, once things start to make sense she seems to be better able to sort out her thought and feelings.

Cupid is a fun little pug. Emma things he’s a matchmaker and truly takes that thought process to heart. She thinks he helped set her old babysitter up, her dad, her friend Hallie and more.

This was a really cute book to read and I look forward to reading more books by this author in the future!… (altro)

{My thoughts} – Cecillia is a smart girl that has a passion and a love for animals. She spends her spare time helping at the local animal rescue called Orphan Paws. While she is there one afternoon a cute little pug comes in and he’s in horrible shape. She is the one that ends up cleaning him up and gaining his trust. She bonds with him and really wants to keep him, but has to figure out how to ask her dad if she can have a dog or not.

Lori the person that runs the shelter, tries to give her the time she needs to talk to her dad. However, it doesn’t seem to work out in Cecillia’s favor because a boy from her class ends up coming to the shelter and his family adopts the pug. She feels betrayed and sad and hurt and wants to just spend as much time with the pug as she can before he goes off to live with his new owners. It turns out though that she becomes friends with the boy {Eric’s} twin sister and gets to spend a lot of time around the pug. She settles for that option but then Eric asks her to help him train the pug so that it can take part in dog shows. She agrees, because it means she can spend even more time with the pug.

I have to admit, this wasn’t quite what I was expecting when I’d started to read this book. I have a habit of not reading a books synopsis before I start the book. I do that so then I don’t judge a book without giving it a good go. I try to read the first few chapters and judge from there. This book turned out to be more then I had expected. It was incredible. I love that it was about animal rescue. I love that Cecillia was so passionate about helping animals that she continued to volunteer at the shelter even after she’d lost the pug to her classmates. I love that meeting that sweet little pug was what helped her to come out of her shell! This book was just so incredible. It made me laugh, it made me tear up and it made me think about how even young children have a hard time dealing with the toughness of some of the situations that they are forced to deal with on a regular basis.

I think that any child that reads this book will be able to learn something from it’s pages. There is so much within the pages, that there is so much to take away. So, so much, that I highly recommend this book for children, middle grade and even junior high! I look forward to reading more books by this author in the future!… (altro)

{My thoughts} – Sam comes home from school one day and sees that the gate to their home is left open. When she walks through she finds a box with two adorable pugs inside laying on a blanket. She isn’t really sure what to do about the pugs at this point, but she does want to keep them. She decides to take them up to her room and hide them from her parents.

I can’t see agree with how she went about trying to keep them, but she did do some things right. She did put out a poster trying to find the owners. However, once her parents know about the dogs they go about correcting everything she did that was wrong. They go about putting up am more suitable poster that has her mom’s phone number on it instead of hers. They go to the store and get everything that they need for the dogs. Eventually the dogs start to become a part of the family. Surprisingly her mom does warm up to them even though she really didn’t want them to begin with.

Sam’s family is major into cooking and it’s what they do and love. Her little brother is a loner and really into his video games. It takes some outside perspective but eventually Sam realizes that her little brother wants to be included in things as much as she is, he even wants to be part owner to the dogs.

Towards the end of the book some girl named Karen shows up at their house. She says she is the owner of the dogs and she gives a story that is less then crazy. It’s one of those it might be true but I highly doubt it kind of things. There is a lot that takes place once this girl shows up, but the thing that I enjoyed reading about the most was how Same and her family all came together -when they needed to most.

I look forward to reading more books about Pugs by this author in the near future. She has a wonderful talent when it comes to writing about middle school crush/animal love.… (altro)

{My thoughts} – Ana is a sweet girl. She helps her upstairs neighbor out by walking her dog for her. Her upstairs neighbor is elderly and cannot manage to go up and down five flights of stairs on a regular basis. So, since she can’t do that, she pays Ana to do it for her. Which is a win win situation for Ana. Ana wants a dog but her mom won’t let her have one, so in a way this allows her to have a dog, since she spends so much time with her neighbors dog, Osito.

Once day Ana is out walking Osito at the park and she runs into Calvin and his dog Pancake. Pancake and Osito hit it off as well as Ana and Calvin do. The problem is that Calvin assumes that Osito is Ana’s dog and she does nothing to correct him from thinking it. Instead that little lie ends up festering into bunches of bigger more not so good lies.

When it is time for Ana to finally come clean her and Calvin end up not being on good terms. It does take them a bit, but they do eventually work through all the bad. Ana’s sister and best friend help to ensure that things don’t go too sour when they are working through things.

I really enjoyed this book. I love reading this soft crush books. I can see some of them actually happening in a child’s life and others not so much. But this is one of those where I Can picture the characters and their happy ever after. I really liked how everything was pulled together in the end. I look forward to reading more books by this author in the future, there is for sure some incredible talent in her writing!… (altro)