American Girl Book Reviews: Lanie's Real Adventures

It's time for another American Girl book review! This time, I'm reviewing Lanie's Real Adventures.

The book was about Lanie's continuing adventures as a girl interested in the outdoors. Her garden is growing, she even grows another garden in the front yard, and her best friend Dakota is about to come home. Lanie makes friends with a boy named Nicholas at garden summer camp and is happy to learn more about ladybugs from him, but her problems with nosy neighbor Ms. Marshall get worse when she finds out that Ms. Marshall uses pesticides in her rose garden that might ruin Lanie's garden and she wants Lanie's front yard garden to go away. But Lanie figures out a plan to find a solution to her and her neighbor's garden woes- and educate the public about the outdoors. The book, as well as the other in the series, was written by Jane Kurtz, who also wrote the Saba: Under The Hyena's Foot book for the short-lived Girls of Many Lands line.

Like the last book in the series, this book was very enjoyable. I liked the plot a bit more than the last one, because it seemed like it had a better conflict and was more realistic. Lanie was as good as a character as ever, and her world got to be more developed this time around. I also appreciated how the book began with Lanie camping with her family, as they promised Lanie a camping trip at the end of the last book. There was nothing, in particular, I would change about the book, but I think an element I didn't enjoy was that the book seemed a bit slow. The conflict wasn't introduced until chapter 5 and the solution wasn't until chapter 11 of a 12 chapter book. I would have cut the filler a bit and made it feel like a smoother read. I would give this book a 7/10.