Sisters Turtle and Twig move to a new house with their parents -- a very tiny house that is essentially one room, in order to live more simply. Twig doesn't necessarily mind having a sleeping bag on the floor, a door that doubles as a table, and only 3 shirts and 3 pairs of pants to wear. But she does hate that the family's big Great Dane dog had to stay behind with their grandmother and she's wary about starting out at a new school in October after everyone else has already been there for weeks.

This was a decent read for children in the younger elementary grades. It is relatively short all around, with chapters that aren't particularly long either and a vocabulary that isn't overly taxing.

The story was trying to accomplish a lot in a short space. There's the new home with the tiny living space, there's fitting in at a new school and making friends, and then there's the question of Bo the Great Dane. Although some of these plot threads felt a little short shrifted (particularly the tiny home element), Jacobson manages to cohesively blend it all together fairly well. I do wish she spent a little more time on the tiny house concept in part because it seems like the negatives were explored more than the positives. On the flip side, I think she handled the friendship storyline and the Bo storyline really well by blending them together as Twig works on an opinion piece for school about why she should keep Bo and other students end up working alongside her on the project. Also, I absolutely LOVED that Jacobson introduced a "Social Skills Club," in which children who have a hard time making friends and/or expressing themselves meet together with a teacher who helps advise them. I don't know offhand of any schools that actually have such a club, but I hope some do.

The black and white illustrations are a nice touch as they accurately show what is happening in the book; readers who are still struggling occasionally with certain words or phrases will really benefit from them as well. The illustrations make it clear that a handful of characters are people of color and that one child uses a wheelchair, although the text does not explicitly say any of that, beyond a couple of naming conventions.

This book is the first in a series and I can see young readers snapping them all up to find out what Turtle and Twig will be up to next in their everyday adventures. ( )

Twig is running out of first day juice: she's about to start her third first day of third grade, this time in Happy Trails, Colorado. Twig's little sister, Turtle, is still excited, though; Twig envies how Turtle makes friends easily. Luckily, the two sisters mostly get along well, because they live in a tiny house with their parents - part of their mission to leave a light footprint on the earth. Unfortunately for Twig, though, this means her uncle's great dane, Bo, can't live with them - and he can't live with her grandma, either, because he howls while she's at work. Grandma is going to have to find a new home for Bo - unless Twig can find a solution first. With the help of her friends in Social Skills Club, she just might be able to pull it off...

This transitional chapter book is delightfully fresh and realistic; Twig is the main character but Turtle is also well-rounded. I liked the twist of Twig realizing through SS club that the kids she thought were making fun of her actually weren't - a reminder to dig a little beyond one's first assumptions. Looking forward to more in this series! ( )