Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Wild (Oprah's Book Club 2.0)

by Cheryl Strayed

NATIONAL BEST SELLER • Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection. • 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.

Reviewed by readingwithbecs on

4 of 5 stars

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This is the memoir of Cheryl Strayed. In her early 20'es she lost her mother to cancer. Is this book Strayed tells her story of how she fell apart after her mothers death, and how that got her to make the spontaneous decision to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, which starts at the Mexican border and ens at the Canadian border.
The book is mainly about her hiking the PCT, but we also get flashbacks from her life, mainly involving her mother.
Strayed does a fantastic job at describing her journey and her life in a way that makes you want to keep reading and learn more about her. If you like memoirs, I highly recommend this one.

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 1 October, 2019: Finished reading
  • 1 October, 2019: Reviewed