Wild: From Lost To Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Many of us have, at one time or another, wondered what we would do if we had several months of free time. I had thought it might be interesting to walk the Appalacian Trail; Cheryl Strayed decided, instead, to walk the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), which she chronicled in her memori Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.

In her early twenties, Strayed went through a rough several years: the death of her mother to a recently diagnosed cancer, the slow drifting away from her step-father and siblings, and the end of her first marriage. Needing to get away and find her center, Strayed decided to hike the PCT, a feat made even more remarkable when one considers that she had not hiked any distance prior to starting out.

Wild is, for the most part, an intense, quick read. The beginning of the book describes her mother's relatively sudden death after an advanced cancer diagnosis and how Strayed cares for her mother is slightly reminiscent of parts of Anna Quindlen's novel One True Thing. While this section seemed to drag a little, as well as the break-up of Strayed's marriage, both sections are needed to help the reader understand her state of mind and why she felt the need to get out and hike the PCT. Her descriptions of the trail, the people she meets along the trail - who are somewhat few and far between and predominantly men - and the sense of peace the hike gave her make the book an interesting read.

There were only a few places in the book that, I felt, Strayed could have condensed. One place was when she and her brothers had to put down her late mother's old, sick horse, Lady. It was obviously quite traumatic for Strayed. However, she goes into way more detail of the horse's death than is necessary. Also, near the end of the book, she met up with a man working at a bar who she got to know very intimately during the few days they were together. That section, too, could have been condenses; suffice it to say that what she's written of the encounter would have made a fantastic erotic short story. Then there's the heroin experimentation. Those three sections - or, rather, the elaboration in those three sections - make Wild questionable for very young or very sensitive readers.

This is not to say that the book should be ignored. It is, for the most part, a truly amazing memoir, one that should be read more than once.

View all my reviews Note: To read my review about two books on hiking the Appalacian Trail, click here. There, you'll read aboutAWOL On The APpalachian Trail, by David Miller, and Dennis Blanchard's Three Hundred Zeros.

Kidowed, by Jessica Kenley

Kidowed by Jessica Kenley


What would you do if you outlived your children? How would this affect you? In Kidowed, Jessica Kenley tells how the death of her two children to a rare genetic disease affected her.

Kenley had planned to divorce her husband of two years when she discovers she's pregnant with their son. After Ethan's birth, Kenley learns that her son has epidermolysis bullosa, a disease that affects his skin. According to www.debra.org, approximately 200 children a year are born with e.b.; the disease can range anywhere from mild to extremely severe. Ethan dies from the disease. Not long afterwards, Kenley becomes pregnant with her daughter, Kaylee, who also dies from e.b.

The first half of the book deals mainly with Kayley's life and death, both singly as in comparison to Ethan's life with the disease, while the second half deals with how Kenley copes with the after-effects of her children's deaths.

Jessica Kenley's family and her sense of humor both help her through the dark days of dealing with her children's illness and the after-effects where she tries getting her life back together. Early on, Kenley writes, "I got married. Two years later, right after we had decided to get a divorce, I found out I was pregnant. Whoops." She and her husband, "who we'll refer to as 'Bobo the sperm guy,'" split up the month before Ethan is born. (She also writes that Joy, her therapist, has told her that "anger is my biggest issue. Who knew?") She also gives most people nicknames, rather than their real names, such as Bobo (her ex-), her friend "Nice," and her Aunt "Sweetheart."

When Kaylee dies, half-way through the book, the reader is left to wonder how Kenley can fill another half a book without her children. While she writes how she falls apart on various levels, and how she attempts to cope, Kenley could have drastically shortened the second half of the book. It was almost as though there were two books - before the deaths, and after them. However, there were several places in the second half that I had to scan to keep from putting the book down completely, places where Kenley could have drastically condensed what she was going through in an effort to assuage the pain of her children's deaths.

In the end, though, Kenley writes a sympathetic memoir about the pain of her children's death.

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