Wolf: The Journey Home

 Summery:
 In this fictionalized account of real events, a female wolf named Marta, along with her young family, sets out on an epic journey to return to their home hunting grounds in Montana after they are mistakenly relocated by a group of naturalists. Told believably from Marta’s point of view, the story takes the reader deep into a wolf's world, as Marta's determination to protect her pups and find their way home takes her on adventures that are by turns heart warming, perilous, and ultimately tragic.

Review: SPOILERS!
This isn't a happy story so if your looking for a touchy, feely book about wolves skip this one. Unlike Julie of the Wolves in which most of the wolves have a happy ending almost none of these wolves do. Our wolf family gets shot, injured, hit by cars, starves to death, and put down for preying on livestock. But some how this book is still good. We bond with our wolves, we cheer when they make a kill, and we want to cry when something happens to one of them. So if you are welling to deal with all that and more this is the wolf book for you.

Ashes

Summery:
It could happen tomorrow . . .

An electromagnetic pulse flashes across the sky, destroying every electronic device, wiping out every computerized system, and killing billions.

Alex hiked into the woods to say good-bye to her dead parents and her personal demons. Now desperate to find out what happened after the pulse crushes her to the ground, Alex meets up with Tom—a young soldier—and Ellie, a girl whose grandfather was killed by the EMP.

For this improvised family and the others who are spared, it’s now a question of who can be trusted and who is no longer human.

Author Ilsa J. Bick crafts a terrifying and thrilling novel about a world that could be ours at any moment, where those left standing must learn what it means not just to survive, but to live amidst the devastation.

Review:
Let me sum up how this book went for me:
Good, really getting into it...
Very good 4 or 5 star book....
Loving this book....
What the heck just happened?
Did we switch authors?
What the heck!!!!!

Let me explain, the first half of this book rocked, we had an awesome main character, good supporting characters, and an interesting plot that just made you want to know more. Then about half way through a dramatic event happens (sorry no spoilers) and the story stops and restarts 3 days later leaving us knowing very little about what happened and we only get to find out what happens through bits and pieces. And the author's style, along with the story line, just changes so dramatically that you are thrown out of the groove of story telling. 

So I loved it and then was ticked off by it but it still managed to pull off 3 stars, so I'm going to have to pick up the sequel when it comes out and hope it's like the first half of Ashes.

The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance

Summery:
 A vegan-turned-hunter reignites the connection between humans and our food sources and continues the dialog begun by Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver

As a boy, Tovar Cerulli spent his summers fishing trout and hunting bullfrogs. While still in high school, he began to experiment with vegetarianism and by the age of 20, he was a vegan. Ten years later, in the face of declining health, he would find himself picking up a rifle and heading into the woods.

Through his personal quest, Tovar Cerulli bridges disparate worldviews and questions moral certainties, challenging both the behavior of many hunters and the illusion of blamelessness maintained by many vegetarians. Are fishing and hunting barbaric, murderous anachronisms? Or can they be respectful ways for humans to connect to nature? How harmless is vegetarianism? Can sustenance hunters and vegetarians be motivated by similar values and instincts?

In this time of intensifying concern over ecological degradation, how do we make peace with the fact that, even in growing organic vegetables, life is sustained by death? Drawing on personal anecdotes, philosophy, history, and religion, Cerulli shows how America’s overly sanitized habits of consumption and disconnection with our food have resulted in so many of the health and environmental crises we now face.

Review:

 Honesty I don't know how to feel about this book. Some parts had a really good flow and brought up interesting ideas, in others it repeated its self and at times you didn't realize what was happening until afterwords because of the weird way it was worded.

So it's a good idea for a book and some parts work really well, but the majority I just wanted to skip and really wish where cut out or redone.

Received from NetGallary.