What kobo.com says: A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.
Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
What I say: This is a great book. Perfect page turner and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It made my back hurt and feet ache for her. I love a good hike but this book was definitely an amazing achievement both physically and emotionally. Although I was riveted I was always expecting disaster to happen at every turn. And even though disaster never came, just mainly hardships I was always expecting the worst. I clearly have a vivid imagination. I also kept picturing Cheryl as much older than she was when she hiked the PCT (at age 26). I’m going to assume it’s based on what she went through prior to the hike and the way she writes. She’s got an old soul. The only thing I would constructively criticize is I didn’t get amazing vivid descriptions of the landscape by the author. I was yearning for better mental pictures of what she was seeing as she hiked. I wanted to place myself there on her hike and I couldn’t really picture it.
However, all in all, I love that when people are broken they can be rebuilt by nature. What an amazing gift our planet gives us.