Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book came highly recommended by a writer who called it "brave." What rot. I can't believe I spent money on this dreck. The death of the author's mother and the author's subsequent grief is, supposedly, responsible for the author's descending into years of promiscuity and drug abuse. Everyone grieves differently, of course, but the author seems blithely unaware that perhaps her mother's death was not the foundational problem. The horrifyingly brutal murder of her dead mother's neglected horse (which the author herself has allowed to starve) is a cheap purchase on the reader (as these types of scenes usually are--read Richard Wright's "Almos' a Man" if you want to see how such scenes both honor the animal and teach the reader something about human pain). If she and her brother had done this to a person, they'd be in prison (in fact, doing this to an animal will put you in jail). How she got away with it is beyond me. And her utter lack of remorse is depraved. To make matters worse, it's not enough that she starved, tortured and killed this horse; she then realized--all these years later--that she could gain further purchase on it for literary shock-value. So rather than honor the horse and its terrible suffering, she--unbelievably--hacks away at it one more time and uses it as a metaphor for her own psychic pain: "Who cares about the horse? It's all about ME!" (read Linda Hogan's memoir--"The Woman Who Watches Over the World"--if you want to experience a real writer's exploration of the meaning of suffering, both equine and human). As for her "brave" trip: she doesn't bother to educate herself in preparation (aside from what she needs to shop for), thinks incessantly about herself along the way, virtually ignores the natural world (except insofar as it poses obstacles), and trashes the trail as she goes. She learned nothing. Zero. Zip. From the opening page to the end, I distrusted this author's voice. There's something not truthful, and even pathological, about her understanding of the world, and her place in it. Brave? Give me a break. She's merely a self-absorbed hack, who figured out how to exploit sex, abuse, animals, and Nature as a great marketing tool to showcase her own . . . whatever. I'm sure it was cathartic for her. For me, it was an utter waste of time. Save your money.