Torch

I listened to Torch after Tiny Beautiful Things and Wild, in that order. In her prelude she explains that Torch is based on real events but is not a memoir. The prior books have me the back story. To me, Torch is an example of true art: Strayed grappled with her mother's death and its consequences, which unmoored her for many years and alienated her from her family, and from this experience she produced a novel in which she is able to consider the event from the perspective of every family member. I was very deeply moved by it.

Good writing and a compelling story. This is Cheryl Strayed's first published novel and is very autobiographical. I think it could do with some editing, but it is pretty darn good for a first book. Ms. Strayed definitely has a gift with the language.

How one family in small-town Minnesota handles grief. I come from not-quite-so-small town Wisconsin, right on the border of Minnesota, but my mother is from a town of 326 in northern Minnesota. I enjoyed the touches of home.

If you have any personal battles with cancer, you may or may not want to read this - I currently have a cat with a 3-month-old cancer diagnosis. He's doing wonderfully but it's still just painfully raw. This was a very hard book to read and brought back a lot of difficult feelings. Even writing this is very hard. Perhaps for people who have humans with cancer and have a more similar struggle this might be a cathartic thing; I can't say. For me it was just very painful.

The writing was still very, very good. I look show more forward to reading Strayed's other work. show less

It was neat to read the novel that Strayed always referred to in her Dear Sugar letters, and with what I knew about her background and her writing style, it was clear this was truly her novel. Her word choice is absolutely arresting:

"She ached. As if her spine were a zipper and someone had come up behind her and unzipped it and pushed his hands into her organs and squeezed, as if they were butter or dough, or grapes to be smashed for wine (1)."

The relationships between the characters resonated as true, though really heartbreakingly dysfunctional. Definitely not a comfort food book.

Whenever someone asks me for a book recommendation, Torch is the first title that pops into my head. I picked it up a few months ago, read the first line, and couldn't put it down. And, even after I was done, it stayed with me. That is my definition of a good book.

But there was something more to this book than the fact that it was thoroughly engrossing and beautifully written. (There are many books which fall into this category.) What made this book stand out in my mind was the astounding courage of the author. Strayed tackled the difficult topic of grief with unflinching honesty, and without once sinking into sentimentality or bathos. Her characters were not only real in a way that one seldom encounters in fiction, but seemed possessed show more of that luminous quality of humanity that one only finds in an author who is not afraid to take life on its own terms.

For this reason, Torch will always be on my "favorites" list. show less

Teresa Rae Wood is a firecracker. After escaping an abusive marriage she comes into her own. The host of her own radio show, Modern Pioneers!, Teresa lives an idyllic life in small-town Minnesota with common-law husband Bruce and her two children: 17-year-old Josh and 20-year-old Claire. When, out of the blue, Teresa is diagnosed with terminal cancer, the family's whole world changes. Within months Teresa is dead. Reeling from the shock, Bruce, Claire, and Josh falter; the family comes apart at the seams.

Torch is less a novel about someone suffering from cancer as it is an exploration of the anatomy of grief. The whole feeling of the novel changes with Teresa's death. It becomes more fragmented, mirroring of the lives of the family.

In show more Torch, Strayed looks honestly at grief and suffering. Her characters are fully realized, immensely human in their failings and small triumphs, and her descriptions of rural Minnesota have an air of authenticity. Smattered with the inescapable humor of everyday life, the novel is more than just sad. All this combines to make a story that, though it is fiction, is true.

An accomplished novel -- a novel that does not read like a debut -- Torch speaks eloquently to anyone who has suffered a great loss. How it affects others, I can't honestly say. Reading this book and writing this review I can't hide from the fact that my best friend died when I was nine and that I make my husband change the channel whenever the trailer for the soon-to-be released Bridge to Terabitha movie comes on. And, that's a good thing.
(15 Feb 2007) show less

[[Cheryl Strayed]]'s [Wild] was a great treat - so open and raw - that I anticipated [Torch] to be as good. Sadly, it's not. The book features a family trying to recover from the loss of the matriarch to cancer. Each of the family - a husband, a daughter, and a son - sort through their grief in different ways, all somewhat catastrophic. The characters end up rather unlikeable and grating - mind you, not every character needs to be likable in a book, but I'm looking for somewhere to go, and Strayed doesn't really offer anywhere to land. Her writing sustained me through the book, but I ultimately decided that I'll stick to her non-fiction work.

3 bones!!!