Ms Strayed takes the reader to a difficult time in her life - grieving for her dead mother and blowing up her own life with destructive personal choices. And then the author decides to hike part of the PCT and this memoir is the tale of how this difficult and challenging journey brought healing to her soul. The book isn't full of soul searching - it is very much grounded in the physical pain and challenges of the trail. But nevertheless, the process did help her work through her loss and choose to stop destroying her life. I really enjoyed the details of how she coped from day to day. ( )

Forgiveness

KIRKUS REVIEWUnsentimental memoir of the author?s three-month solo hike from California to Washington along the Pacific Crest Trail.Following the death of her mother, Strayed?s (Torch, 2006) life quickly disintegrated. Family ties melted away; she divorced her husband and slipped into drug use. For the next four years, life was a series of disappointments. ?I was crying over all of it,? she writes, ?over the sick mire I?d made of my life since my mother died; over the stupid existence that had become my own. I was not meant to be this way, to live this way, to fail so darkly.? While waiting in line at an outdoors store, Strayed read the back cover of a book about the Pacific Crest Trail. Initially, the idea of hiking the trail became a vague apparition, then a goal. Woefully underprepared for the wilderness, out of shape and carrying a ridiculously overweight pack, the author set out from the small California town of Mojave, toward a bridge (?the Bridge of the Gods?) crossing the Columbia River at the Oregon-Washington border. Strayed?s writing admirably conveys the rigors and rewards of long-distance hiking. Along the way, she suffered aches, pains, loneliness, blistered, bloody feet and persistent hunger. Yet the author also discovered a newfound sense of awe; for her, hiking the PCT was ?powerful and fundamental? and ?truly hard and glorious.? Strayed was stunned by how the trail both shattered and sheltered her. Most of the hikers she met along the way were helpful, and she also encountered instances of trail magic, ?the unexpected and sweet happenings that stand out in stark relief to the challenges of the trail.?A candid, inspiring narrative of the author?s brutal physical and psychological journey through a wilderness of despair to a renewed sense of self.

I was excited to read this and was truly disappointed. It was an easy to read and well written book but I found myself struck repeatedly throughout by how much I really disliked Cheryl Strayed. I haven't been so annoyed with an author since I read "Eat, Pray, Love"!

(Come to think of it, I got pretty irked by the woman in "Blood, Bones and Butter" so maybe I just have a problem with female memoirists who are close to my own age.)

I disagreed with nearly every decision she made, I was horrified by her ill preparedness, and I was disappointed her depiction of the PCT. I felt like I didn't learn much of anything except that she was overly obsessed by the death of her mother. I know, I sound awful and unsympathetic, but I lost a parent at about that same age and it didn't make me into a whiny, cheating, heroin user.

I think my expectations were just in the wrong place for the book. I was expecting more of an outdoorsy adventure tale and got a therapy session with a person I didn't care about.

One more thing: could she possibly be any more annoying with the self chosen name STRAYED? My God. I wanted to punch her when I got to that section and even more when she got the stupid necklace. I am totally skeptical of the Strayed/starved stories. ( )

Enjoyable story of the author's hike of the Pacific Coast Trail in the 90s, as an attempt to heal her psyche from a number of personal and familial wounds. ( )