You are in two separate worlds, one with your friends and one at home with your family. With your friends you can have fun and forget everything, back at home you are being torn apart by your parents, but you have to be strong for your little sister. Joy feels both of these things in A Soft Place to Land by Janae Marks. Joy just moved into an apartment and she is having a hard time adjusting, especially when her parents keep fighting. When she meets Nora everything changes. Nora, who also lives at the apartment, invites her to the hideout. The hideout is a secret room under the apartment that only the kids know about. Joy is running pretty smoothly now but then it turns back into everything is so overwhelming again. It started with the Joyful dog walkers and ended with a secret message on the hideout’s wall. The Joyful dog walkers is a business her, and Nora started and this is how she is going to pay for the piano she wants. Joy, being curious, wants to figure out who wrote the messages. Just as she starts figuring it out her parents need to have time away from each other, so her dad goes and stays at her uncle’s house. Through all of this, she still needs to be strong. Joy goes on a walk and all of a sudden loses Ziggy one of the dogs she was walking. Will Joy ever figure out who is writing the messages? Will Joy ever feel at home again with her parents fighting? Read A Soft Place to Land to find out.
If you liked the book A Soft Place to Land by Janae Marks you might also enjoy reading Paper Wishes by Lois Sepahban. In Paper Wishes the girl loses her dog just like how Joy loses Ziggy. In this book, the main character is forced to leave her home and leave her dog too. She tries to sneak him away, but gets caught and is forced to abandon the dog. She wishes every day that her dog will come back to her by sending out drawings of the dog into the air. Will she ever find her dog again? Will she ever make it back home? Read Paper Wishes by Lois Sepahban to find out but don’t forget to read A Soft Place to Land by Janae Marks.