Eat, Fast, Slim: The Life-Changing Fasting Diet for Amazing Weight Loss and Optimum Health by Amanda Hamilton

This book explains the concept of intermittent fasting as a way to lose weight and become more healthy as opposed to traditional dieting. She explains how long term calorie restriction, which is how traditional dieting works, can actually make people prone to weight gain and how fasting can lead to weight loss, reduce inflammation, help adults to concentrate better and more. She explains the difference in fasting for men and women and shares a variety of fasting plans including the 16/8 lifestyle fast, 5/2 fasting, and juice fasting. She includes recipes and recommends eating whole foods rather than heavily processed foods. I have tried this and found that it is easier to have two "fast days" of eating 500 calories than it is to diet traditionally. On a traditional diet, I feel deprived and cranky. On a "fast" day when I eat 500 calories or less, I know I can eat what I want the next day so I don't feel deprived. I actually kind of enjoy the feeling of hunger on a fast day because I know it is doing something good for my body.
The book is well written and researched and I highly recommend it. I got this book free to read from Netgalley and I did find chapter 10 to be oddly formatted and difficult to follow. I am hoping that is something that they will get straightened out.

Road to Tater Hill by Edith M. Hemingway

My 11 year old daughter read this book and told me that it was wonderful and that I had to read it. She was right. It is a sad, sweet story set in 1963 - the year that I was born - about a 10 year old girl whose baby sister was born prematurely and died the next day. The story deals with her mother's depression and how an elderly neighbor woman helps Annie to deal with that and her own feelings of sorrow. The story is well written and beautiful, funny and sad, and hopeful. I highly recommend it.

My Mother Killed Christ: But God Loves Me Anyway by Katie Roberta Stevens

Interesting, bizarre, creepy, sad and funny at times, this book chronicles the author's life as a child of a mentally ill mother. The book kind of wanders around a bit and parts of it had me thinking that the apple did not fall too far from the tree. She tells about both her childhood and her adulthood showing how her neglectful and strange upbringing lead to problems in her adulthood.
I enjoyed the second part of the book, about her adult life as a teacher more than the first part as she went back and forth through the years describing her childhood.  One of the parts that struck me as funny was that when reading a reference to the Madonna, her students thought it was the singer and when she told them it was the virgin Mary, the students giggled at the word "virgin" and most of them had no idea what she was talking about.  After one student explained the concept of the virgin Mary to the class, they laughed that she got knocked up and that was the best excuse that she could come up with and that people actually believed it.  The story about sharing her classroom with a night time nursing class and the missing part of the body model was hilarious too.  While the author's Catholic school education and the way the nuns treated her was good, the creepy priest who made out with her seems to fulfill icky stereotypes and I am not surprised that she does not take part in any organized religion now.          

Promised by Caragh M. O'Brien

This is a decent ending to the trilogy. I think the first book is the best one, but the other two are good also and Promised is an ok ending to the series. Gaia finds that leadership is much more difficult than she realized as she tries to make peace with the people of the Enclave and join their communities. I really was not thrilled with the torture parts of the story and I thought that Gaia was rather stupid to allow herself to be caught more than one time. I realize that trilogies and series are all the rage now, but sometimes it may be best for an author to just write one really good book than to start out with a great book and then try to make it into a set of books that goes downhill after that.

If He Had Been With Me by Laura Nowlin

I do NOT like books with unhappy endings. At all. I knew from the beginning this book would not have a happy ending, but in the end, it was much sadder than I thought it would be. It really was a wonderful book, and I read it all today, but I hated the ending. If you like Nicholas Sparks books - of which I only read one and I hated the ending and will never read any of his books again - then you will probably love this book.
I don't want to make it sound like it is a bad book - it is actually fantastic. But, if you are like me and don't like books with sad endings then just don't read it. Really.
I am giving a 4 star rating because of the ending, but other than that, it really is a 5 star book.

The New Kid by Temple Mathews

Will, is the New Kid in high school AKA Harry Potter/Percy Jackson/Jimmy Neutron/Jack Templar/Timmy Turner/Vladmir Tod/Daniel X/ and all the other teen/preteen boy heros who have some sort of superpowers and save their families/friends/and the world because the adults are too stupid or incapable of saving themselves and the world.
In Will's case, he is a demon hunter with super human strength trying to defeat the Evil One and rescue his father. Lots of fighting, superpowers, James Bondish weapons that Will himself created, a bit of romance, lots more fighting, and of course, saving the world from evil. I think that preteen and teen boys may enjoy the book although I did not find it to be very original.

My Life After Now by Jessica Verdi

Wow. Totally Amazing. I read this whole book today. I could not put it down. Sixteen year old Lucy is devastated when her boyfriend dumps her. She goes out partying with her best friends, gets majorly drunk and wakes up the next morning with the hot musician she met the night before. When she later realizes that she had unprotected sex with him, she gets tested and learns that she is HIV positive.
The issue is handled in a believable, well written and interesting story and includes HIV/Aids info at the end as well as discussion questions. I think this should be a must-read for teens. I got this book free to review from NetGalley. It is really an uber fantastic book and I highly recommend it!