The Puppy Place #3: Shadow

My daughter read this book in one day; it was a nice story and she couldn't stop talking about it.

My 7-year-old loves all these books. She likes the characters, and the stories are perfect for dog-lovers. Highly recommended!

My 8 year old daughter devours these books. She has become attached to every puppy in every book, and is very excited to meet Cody, the new Puppy Place member. Shadow is a sweet and gentle dog and my daughter loves the book. She has even started to write her own Puppy Place series about dogs she makes up. I like her enthusiasm for these books.

I wrote a review for the series under the book "Snowball" so my extended comments are located there. So far, my daughter (first grade) has covered the first three books in the series and the quality is equally high among all of them. All books seem to be successive but I only know the sequence for the first three: Goldie, Snowball, Shadow, Rascal, and Buddy. Reading them in sequence is not necessary but I highly recommend doing so because character development and the storyline build (slightly) across the series. Also, later books reveal the outcome of prior books. As a sidebar, I agree with the reviewer's comments about the toddler character. Through the first three books, his main activity is to crawl around the house acting like a puppy and playing with puppy toys, and his vocabulary seems limited to "Uppy." Fortunately, the primary children characters think and behave--and have emotions--like real children.

and she doesn't even like dogs! There are 4 books in this series, she is on the 3rd one and has loved each one. She is in first grade and had no trouble reading or understanding the books, so I think the age range given here (9 to 12) is a little misleading, The plot is very straighforward, which is why she is able to read them. We recently got a puppy (she wanted a kitten, but her dad is allergic) and she's learned alot about puppies, how to care for them and why they do what they do, so even though this isn't great literature it's helpful in that regard. One odd think that she had noticed - the main characters have a baby brother who is 3 - but can't talk and crawls around on the floor - her brother is 3 and he's certainly not like that. I don't know if the author just doesn't know about small children or the child has some disability that the book doesn't talk about, but my daughter always brings it up as "weird."