Wild

Dare I?

Should I write a negative review?

I try not to. It’s not an issue of dishonesty. I simply won’t post any review of a book I don’t think I can recommend honestly. If you come into the bookstore, I wouldn’t hand you all the books I think you wouldn’t like, and so I wouldn’t do that here either.

But it’s a little more complicated than that with Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. I don’t think it’s a bad book…I just think I’m the wrong reader for it. Or, at least, the wrong reader for some of it.

What I mean is that I’m a sucker for a good adventure book. Jon Krakauer, Sebastian Junger…I love that stuff, and that’s what I thought I had in Wild. The prologue was very promising — a short story of the day Cheryl Strayed lost her boots over a cliff on the Pacific Crest Trail. And then I started the first chapter. Some legitimately heart-wrenching family stuff. “Okay,” I thought, “we’ll get some background for the author, and then we’ll get straight to the good outdoor adventure.” And for a while, I was rewarded.

Then there was some more family stuff. Then a bit of hiking. Then some marriage and relationship history. More hiking. Back to family stories. Some drug use. Childhood memories. Whining about blisters from hiking.

And then, somewhere between the drug use and the childhood memories, I realized that the book isn’t really about an outdoor adventure at all. Wild is about transformation, or finding oneself, or loss, or healing, or any of number of things that have nothing in particular to do with the outdoors or adventure.

This was a disappointing revelation to me.

Undoubtedly, this reveals more about me than it does about the book. I can live with that.

If you enjoy the writings of Jon Krakauer or Sebastian Junger; if you read Outdoor magazine; if you want man facing nature at its most unforgiving and extreme…look elsewhere.

On the other hand, if you enjoy emotionally raw, honest memoirs; if you read Jeannette Walls or Mary Karr; if you want the author to spill the ugly details of her life…give Wild a shot. Just ignore the hiking boot on the cover.