The Book Mistresses
November 2013 - Book # 113
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
Chosen by Terese
Excerpt from cover:
"A poerful, 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 loose, 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 a 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 the loniness of the trail. Tols 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."
The Book Mistresses' Review
The memoir is based on Cheryl Strayed's emotional struggle with the death of her mother and how that affected her marriage, her plunge in to the use of drugs, the desire to have sexual encounters with men and her ultimately losing her way in life. However,that is only the premise for her impressive hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, covering more than a thousand miles, solo! As an unexperienced hiker/backpacker, she brings humor and insight into her journey. The need to make this treacherous hike alone is a point Strayed drives home through her writing. During her hike she encountered others and they were important in her pilgrimage providing advice, encouragement and example. She made friends with them in a sort of brotherhood way for the experience of the trail that no one else could share with her. Yet she hiked separately, only meeting up with her comrades at the stops to restock supplies. Facing fears, extreme weather conditions, physical hardship, and getting lost, she is able to face her despair become physically and mentally strong and ultimately she finds healing. By the time Strayed completes the trail, she is able to make a new place for herself in life. As a group we discussed her naive decision to think she could possibly do this hike without any training. We also talked about her mother and their close relationship they shared. We examined the relationship of her siblings, her stepfather and how the deterioration of those relationships affected her. One disappointment we shared is that we wanted to connect more to the visual element of nature on such an epic hike. In summary, we enjoyed reading this woman's remarkable adventure and applauded her success. The only true drawback of this novel was there was not the wow factor on the nature scale. After that hiking experience, there must have been those wow moments but we as readers weren't fortunate enough to share in them. However, would we recomend this adventurous book? Definitely.