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Girl in the Woods

by Aspen Matis
Morrow. Sept. 2015. 384 p. ISBN 9780062291066. $24.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062291080. MEMOIR
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On the author's second night at Colorado College, she is raped by an acquaintance in her dorm room. Her parents have a lackluster reaction to the news and the school's conflict mediation process absolves her rapist of any wrongdoing. She then finds herself adrift at a school where the perpetrator lives in the same dorm and she has not yet made any close friends. So, she decides to drop out to hike the 2,663-mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. It's an astoundingly physical undertaking, especially for a 19-year-old woman. She faces near-starvation, dangers hitchhiking, wild animals, and at one point, a medical emergency. Some of the decisions she makes on the beginning of her hike will have readers shaking their heads, but by the end her rebirth is palpable.
VERDICT Impossible to avoid comparisons to Cheryl Strayed's Wild, this memoir is a younger version, with more uncertainty that comes along with being 19. Strayed fans will enjoy.
Reviewed by Staff , Aug 20, 2015
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