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3.5 

Wild (Oprah's Book Club 2.0 Digital Edition)

By Cheryl Strayed
Wild (Oprah's Book Club 2.0 Digital Edition) by Cheryl Strayed digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and she would do it alone.

Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
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Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection: This special eBook edition of Cheryl Strayed’s national best seller, Wild, features exclusive content, including Oprah’s personal notes highlighted within the text, and a reading group guide. 

16 Reviews

3.5
“Oh boy. Grab a cup of tea for this review. I got a lot to say. My first thought was that it was going to be like "Eat, Pray, Love". Instead of shirking her responsibilities to work and family and spending a bunch of money she doesn't have so she can eat grubs with toothless monks and have sex with strange European men, Cheryl Strayed takes a short cut and just hikes the Pacific Crest trail. This kind of story is always bull. I couldn't get past the introduction without immediately disliking her. In the first section, she presents herself as divorced, a drug user, an adulterer, homecoming queen, and cheerleader. And to boot, she colors Minnesotans as north woods cabin-dwellers with no electricity or running water. And I'm supposed to root for her? In the first chapter, she's already hating her husband of four years (who she married at twenty) for no reason, despite the fact that he has been calling her every day (out of concern) while she's at the hospital with her dying mother. But nope, whatever connection she thinks they had "broke". No reason why, it just happened. No reason to make an effort to try and put things back together either. Solid. You sound like a valuable person to me. Especially after you leave your husband and start doing heroin. Then he drives eight hours across the country to intervention you away from her dealer/boyfriend. With nothing to gain from it -- out of the goodness of his heart he does this. After a few months of dealing with the divorce and the death of her mom (and not having a job or source of income), she decides on a whim that she'll hike the Pacific Crest Trail. Based solely on a book she picked up. Listen to me. You are not courageous. You are a screw-up that doesn't know you're a screw-up, and then wonders why there's consequences for your actions. You've been acting selfish all your life, then go out and do something selfish under the guise of "finding yourself", then write a book all about it because you can't fuel your ego enough. You hiking up the Pacific seaboard without learning how to hike properly is not a struggle. It's you being stupid. Your sole source of information was a book published in 1989 (hike took place in 2006) and the pimple-face at REI. You don't know how to wear boots or pack a bag. I read "A Walk in the Woods" by Bill Bryson. That means I'm more qualified than she was. But Strayed makes sure to mention each and every other book she reads on the trail (before she burns them for campfire fuel). Not that any of them help her -- it's all pretentious literary bull like "As I Lay Dying", "Dubliners" and "The Novel". And just in case we forget that she's "well-read", there's a handy list at the back for reference. She's surprised that there's no such thing as a "bad hair day" on the trail. She's no longer worried about the intricacies of being thin or fat. Women have been discovering that for decades. Do you think Mia Hamm or the female American Gladiators worry about their hair? (Well, the gladiators might. They're on TV, after all.) This women is so deep in her self, the idea that anyone around her might have already discovered these gems or feels the same way never occurs to her. She thinks she's finding all these things herself for the first time. And then she doesn't even learn anything. She still has sex with anonymous partners. Just to experience "what a man feels like again". And if that's not enough, if you get the Oprah Book Club edition, you can enjoy all of Queen O's laudations and notes about how she's so courageous, how she's such a good writer, all the passages she loves about "past-bloom flowers in the wind" and being in love with words. Make me puke. The biggest example of her idiocy occurs midway through the book. A man in a car stops up and asks to her interview her for Hobo Times. "But I'm not a hobo," she says, "I'm a backpacker." "Do you have a permanent home?" he asks. "Nope." "Are you walking on the road?" "Yep." "How many times have you slept with a roof over your head in the past month?" "Three." "Is your backpack all you have in the world?" "Yes." "Are you getting around by hitchhiking?" "Yes." "Then please take this standard hobo care package." Which she does. Nice. Way to stay true to your convictions. If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck... This book perpetuates the idea that people who break the rules get the breaks, while the people who follow the rules, go to work every day and do their job, get shafted. Please, women. Please don't look up to self-absorbed people like this for your inspiration.”
“Compelling and well-written, but frustrating in the same way that Into The Wild is frustrating--albeit with a much sunnier outcome--that the main character of the story isn't Cheryl Strayed herself so much as her woeful ignorance of the undertaking she was embarking upon, and the bizarre cult following of readers who seem to completely skip over this fact on their way to idolising her 'spiritual journey'. TLDR Pretty blonde girl blows up her life and goes on a walk with no water, money, underpants or clue. Sees a moose; turns out to be a cow.”

About Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Torch. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, The Rumpus, Self, The Missouri Review, The Sun, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere. She is also the author of the forthcoming Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
 
www.cherylstrayed.com

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