Book: Wild

 Book: Wild

Author: Cheryl Strayed

Pages: 338

This is my 110th read for the year

This is the story of the author's journey to find herself.  4 years after her mother died, with her marriage falling apart, Cheryl decides she is going to hike 1000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail.  She has no hiking experience, but feels with her equipment and strong will, she can do it.  She heads out alone and this book covers her journey over several months and all the people she meets along the way.

This book was just meh.  I wanted to like it more.  I was intrigued by the story of a young woman who decided to hike this trail alone.  But Cheryl went woefully unpreprared.  She had no idea what she was doing and she is lucky she didn't get herself killed.  The back story throughout the book got tedious and overly done.  There was almost as much of her past as their was of her hike, and while I understand this was intentional, the back story dragged quite a bit.  We also hear way too much about her feet.  I wasn't a big fan of Cheryl either.  I felt for her - her mother died when she was only 22 and she had quite a tramatic childhood.  But she imploded as a young adult - got into some heavy drug use and cheating on her husband.  

I was hoping for more, but didn't get it.  Although - the last line of this book was actually a good one. 

"It was my life - like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.

How wild it was, to let it be.”

Stars: 2.5