Girl in the Woods

July 15, 2015
Finding redemption after trauma. Matis sets up the book as a narrative of salvation. On her second night at college, she was raped in her dorm room. Understandably devastated, she dropped out after her freshman year and decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, a la Cheryl Strayed in Wild. Matis periodically reaches back to her childhood in a leafy suburb of Massachusetts, the daughter of two Boston lawyers, to attempt to explain a nagging feeling of not belonging: friends at school teased her for the unfashionable clothes her mother bought her; the girls in her cabin at sleepaway camp teased her; her mother insisted on dressing her until she was well into her teens. Unfortunately, the author is repetitive ("It was a new day, a beautiful one, and I was the director of my life..."; "This time, I'd become the director of my life"), which causes the narrative to bloat (by nearly 100 pages). She also comes off as tone-deaf when she describes her journey on the trail, a trip funded by her parents: "The PCT would end, and I felt panicked. I'd be truly homeless, directionless"-though she also realized that she "could not return to the person she'd picked for me to be. My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child." Matis writes vividly of the culture of the PCT-the special treats the locals put out for hikers to find, called "trail magic," or the "trail angels" who host hikers in small towns along the way-and she is bold in her willingness to expose her psychic wounds. However, it's difficult to remain sympathetic to her struggles when she widens her frame of victimhood to include her feelings of unattractiveness, her efforts to pry herself from her mother's smothering grip, and her inability to put in contact lenses or swallow pills. A memoir of self-discovery by a young writer who still has more work to do.

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September 1, 2015
Matis' world was turned on its head on her second night at Colorado College, when she was raped by a fellow student. When the college did nothing about the assault, save for moving her assailant out of her dorm, Matis toughed it out for a year before deciding to drop out in favor of hiking the famous Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. When Matis starts out in 2008, she's full of grief and anger over the assault and steeped in resentment toward her family for their failure to support her after the rape. Matis immediately joins up with two male hikers, and the party of three becomes a party of two when Matis and one of the hikers, nicknamed Icecap, become romantically involved. But the relationship sours, and Matis finds herself hiking alone on the trail, creating time for introspection but also leaving her vulnerable to danger. Comparisons to Wild (2012) are unavoidable, but readers who decide to accompany Matis on the PCT will find themselves in for an engrossing, often suspenseful journey with a rewarding outcome.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)