Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
4.4 | 75,911 ratings
Price: 18.9
Last update: 01-30-2026
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- BalancingemmaA Wild book reviewI recently finished Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed. It is a book about a woman who hikes a trail on the west coast in hopes of finding herself. It is an autobiography written by Cheryl herself as she hikes.
I think this book is a must read. It was inspiring and uplifting, in a way that only a book about a woman who has hit rock bottom and fights her way back up can. Although there are plenty of books about women who struggle with self identity and depression, Cheryl did a good job of making this one engaging and different. I happen to like the autobiography genre because I like that the story is about real peoples struggles. I like to read about the challenges and how they overcome them, even if the challenges that most autobiographies are written about are extreme and hard to imagine, I feel that I can easily take them in context and apply them to situations that may arise in my, or someone close to me's life. Cheryl made me feel like I was her friend and companion on the hike. I laughed when she laughed and cried when she cried. Although there were points in the journey when even I was bored with the walking, I felt that those points were necessary to make the journey feel real. She did a great job of pulling me back in after these lulls and I was just as engrossed as before.
I found the miscellaneous characters that flutter in and out to be quirky and entertaining. At the end of the book I thought about them and wondered where they were now and how they were doing. She only gave us a fleeting view of them, but she also had just a fleeting view of them herself. She focused more on how they affected her and what she learned from them, rather than on actually developing the characters. I liked that even though it was a book all about the discovery of who Cheryl Strayed really is, she gave us an insight into other characters that she met along the way. She was descriptive enough to set the plot for me, enabling me to envision her beautiful and treacherous hike while at the same time not being sickened by the descriptive words of beauty.
I found the plot easy to follow, although considering the plot is almost entirely about a woman hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, you would think that would be pretty straightforward; however, Cheryl found a way to entwine her trials and tribulations into the book while not making it confusing and jumpy.
I would recommend this book to anyone going through a hard time in their life, but even for people that are not. It is a feel good book that makes you want to go strap a backpack on and take on the PCT today!
I wanted to include some of the negative reviews that I found online. I found that most of them had to do with the actual hike, or the genre as a whole. Many people had written that all she did was complain through the book. I didn’t find this book to be whiny or self-centered. I liked the way that she was forced to focus on herself the entire time. I will say that she complained, a lot, about the hike and how hard it was but I believe that she was using that as a tool to show her readers how much of a journey it was. I think she whined to show that not only was she working through some very tough emotional stuff, she was doing it while working through some very tough physical stuff as well. I am not a hiker, so I have no insight into whether she portrayed hiking, as a sport, correctly so if you are a hiker and would like to shed some light here, feel free. The last complaint that I will talk about was the one of her lifestyle before the hike. I think that many people were cruel in the way that they bashed Cheryl’s lifestyle leading up to the hike. I think that she accurately portrayed a 25 something woman who has a pretty messed up life. I will agree that her choices were poor, but I think she handled it how she thought she could and I think that people who threw stones in the reviews about her life choices, sounded like they hadn’t really dealt with heartbreak and total life failure. There are different types of people in the world, those who make lemonade when life throws them lemons and people that throw the lemons away and chug a bottle of vodka.
If you liked my post, visit my website at www.balancingemma.wordpress.com - Bryan CareyA Journey of Discovery and GrowthGrief can lead us in many different directions. It can lead to self- reflection, a change in priorities, a stronger realization of one’s own mortality, and so on. It can lead people to try things or do things they never considered before. Such is the case with Wild, a true story of a woman shellshocked by grief who decides to take time to find herself by hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.
Wild is a journey of discovery and growth. The author didn’t spend all her time alone hiking the trail, but she was alone for most of it, and she wasn’t as well- prepared, physically or otherwise, as a person should be. Her descriptions of places, people, the outdoors, the physical endurance, and other things help you feel like you are right there with her, experiencing the awe, the relief, the pain, and more.
One of the things I like about this book is that it’s not a story about someone who has everything and decides to see what it’s like to rough it, to live life on the other side. I get tired of books like that; books that feature an individual from a privileged background who decides to find out how others live and survive. No, this is a book about an ordinary person. A person who grew up with little except for the family she cherished, only to have everything unravel, first with her father’s departure, then with her mother’s death, and then with the dissolution of her marriage. Her decision to hike the Pacific Crest Trail was based on the accumulation of grief, lack of self- discipline, and other factors. She does end up learning a few life lessons along they way and she does seem to have grown in the process, so the ending is mostly a happy one.
Where Wild falls a little short is with the author’s somewhat one- track mind and naivete about people in general. As she makes her way from place to place and encounters different men, she immediately wants to comment on their physical looks. To be fair, the entire book is written like that, with adjectives and colorful descriptions every step of the way, so it could be that this is just an extension of the book’s overall writing style. Still, I got a little tired of it. I really don’t care if this man was good- looking and this other one was not. It had little to do with the experience.
Dealing with grief can be difficult and until you have experienced significant loss, there is no way of knowing what you may do. Wild is a good read overall about a woman’s effort to find comfort and forgiveness in the rugged American west and while it does have a few shortcomings, it still makes for an enjoyable read and I’m looking forward now to watching the movie based on this writing. - Mrs.DWild about “Wild”I enjoyed reading this book. It felt very raw honest, almost spiritual and real. Sometimes I felt scared reading it.:)