Jennifer Pharr Davis

I enjoy books about thru-hiking and found this one about a young woman solo hiking the trail quite good. That said, like all AT books, this is a lot of repetition: I hiked, I camped, I ate a lot. You have to really be interested in this subject to care about reading a book like this. I wish that I had done this hike and I don't think I ever will so I really do enjoy living vicariously through books like this.

There's a bit of a tease at the end of the book about the next time the author hiked the AT and I'm glad to see that she wrote a book about that too because I plan to track it down and read it for a completely different take on the trail.… (altro)

I love a good adventure memoir, and what made me want to read this one were all the negative reviews stating the author spoke too much about her faith; since I'm a Christian, I like to hear about this kind of thing. Interestingly enough, I didn't think she spoke enough about it. Based on her account, I got the impression that Pharr Davis is the type of "Christian" who goes to church and tries to do good things but doesn't really care to let her faith impact her everyday life.

I was very disappointed in her behavior on the trail:

- She spent a lot of time unnecessarily judging people based on superficial criteria (like whether or not they smiled at her when passing on the trail).
- She treated many people quite poorly. For example, she doesn't have the decency to tell someone she'd been hiking with for a few days that she no longer wanted to hike together, so instead she lets him believe that they're going to meet up in town and then hikes away as fast as she can to avoid running into him again.
- She acts incredibly entitled throughout the book, and clearly sees herself as better than others because she is a thru-hiker, unlike the other people who can't afford to take months off of work and so instead hike for a just a few days or weeks at a time.
- Also questionable is the fact that she begins dating a non-Christian while on the trail, when God clearly states in the Bible that Christians shouldn't get into relationships with non-Christians.

She turned 22 while hiking, so she was young, and her book was based mostly on her journals during the time. She was constantly saying how much she grew on the trail, and I kept expecting for her to acknowledge her poor behavior as wrong, but she never did; in fact, it appeared to me that the only thing that grew was her confidence in her self-centered entitlement.

I'm giving this two stars simply because the writing wasn't terrible; the descriptions of the trail and landscape were not at all memorable, unfortunately, but the writing was grammatically correct and it mostly flowed okay (some of the dialogue seemed stilted).… (altro)