Wild

Wild
By: Cheryl Strayed
THREE out of FIVE stars

my thoughts:
I definitely jumped on the band wagon with this book. It was all the rage and everyone was reading it. So I did too. I read this book prior to reading 'Torch', I wish I would have read them the way they were published. Silly me.

My first review of this book was it was good. She went on a journey. After reading Torch my review on Wild is sooooo much diferent. Not that in Wild she doesn't explain why she is going on this journey. You definitly wouldn't have to read Torch to get into Wild but for me it really made a difference.

Wild is all about Cheryl coming throuhg life's journey. Life has really played her some cards and this literal journey is what refreshes and cleanses her.

Let me set the record straight a little on this one though. This is not a let me how to teach you how to hike. I don't think at any point Strayed even alludes to this book being anything about that. If anything look at what she did and know what you should not do. Strayed goes on Pacific Crest Trail with no real experience and no real prep. She definitely tells readers this was a mistake but this was also part of her journey.

I guess in my mind there is two folds to this book the literal journey and the emotional journey. The book was about her journey. That is why it gets three stars. To have the boldness to share ones-pure journey is great. To keep her journey as real and honest as she did, mad props. However as far as the literal hiking... I was... let down at how she portrayed women hiking. Women hike that rail. Women alone hike the Pacific Crest Trail.

the run down:
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.