While as much as I’d like to think, I’m not a huge reader. I grew up with my mom and younger sister always having their noses in books so it’s not that I didn’t have the option, I just never did. Granted, I enjoy reading, but normally only when I’m on the beach or on vacation. Especially during the semester when I’m drowning with homework, tests, and papers it’s easier to fall asleep to the light of Friends reruns on my laptop then it is to a good book. But recently I’ve been on a reading kick… I read a few books recently and particularly enjoyed Lovely Bones, while normally murder mysteries aren’t up my alley, I like the dark plot to this book. So as a gift, I bought my mom the book Wild by Cheryl Strayed because books are the perfect gifts for her and I wanted to read it as well.
I had read a few articles with titles such as “Best Books for Women to Read in 2015” and Wild was always on the top of the list. So before reading this book I had high expectations and this book exceeded all of them.
Cheryl Strayed is lost, like most of us are. Her mother has recently passed away at the age of 45 to cancer and Cheryl has gotten herself involved with sex and drugs in order to try and relieve the pain she is suffering. She then, after many internal conflicts, decides she’s going to “hike herself back to the woman her mother wanted her to be”. At 26 Cheryl begins to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) for the next few months. Her goal is to hike to the Bridge of the Gods, which crosses from Oregon to Washington. It’s just herself and her pack hiking through intense heat, rain, snow, and freezing cold weather. No cell phone, credit card, identification, just her and the wild. The book goes into detail of her emotion pain of losing her mother and severe physical pain of hiking 10+ miles everyday with a pack weighing almost half her body weight. She loses toenails, shoes, runs out of water and food, runs into dangerous wildlife, and is bruised from head to toe but keeps on going. It’s a great novel about perseverance and independence.
Along the trail she stops at cabins that other PCT hikers stay for a few nights to purchase more supplies, receive packages, and contact loved ones. While she hikes she meets people, mainly men, and develops relationships with them. A theme in this book is sex, Cheryl felt sex was such a necessary part of her life that she packs condoms in her pack. But as the story goes on, no matter how many attractive guys she meet and befriends, she learns that she doesn’t need a physical relationship with a man to be happy.
Wild gives you the chills with every page you turn. And Cheryl Strayed is the perfect character to guide you on her journey to find herself. She travels from California to Washington and becomes stronger and more independent than she could imagine through the experiences she has and the people she meets. She learns to love her beautiful life, as we all should.
