Review - Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Title: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Author: Cheryl Strayed
Publisher: Knopf Double Day Publishing
Publish Date: March 20, 2012
Hardcover, 336 pages

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I absolutely love this book!! It was so funny and so incredibly honest. Couldn't put it down and recommend it so highly!!

Cheryl has had a really hard life. Her mother has died from Cancer and she had to watch her go through it all. And Cheryl has punished herself the entire time with drugs, strange men and all the while pushing her husband away from her. Not the greatest beginning. At a low point, she is standing in line and sees the book about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and buys the book. And in that one small moment her entire outlook changes. She will go hike this trail and see where it leads her.

The very first chapter tells of her losing her book over the side of a mountain. Irretrievable, she tosses her other boot over as well. In the middle of nowhere, without her boots what will she do.

I love the part where she breaks down and allows another hiker to go through her backpack called the monster because of it's gargantuan size. He pulls out all sorts of things, including 21 condoms. Where she thinks she will be using these is beyond even Cheryl, but she felt the need to bring them anyhow.

She faces life with such a funny outlook. It is almost boarder line absurd. She sinks herself in to these crazy moments, all kind of her own doing and yet, she seems to climb out of them a tiny bit smarter. Until one day, she just gets it. This book is her journey.

If you liked the book Eat, Love, Pray by Elizabeth Gilbert you should definitely read this!

Summary -
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.