Torch - BookWyrm

410 pages

English language

Published Dec. 8, 2014 by Atlantic Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-78239-537-9
OCLC Number:: 881024098

(2 reviews)

"Work hard. Do good. Be incredible!" is the advice Teresa Rae Wood shares with the listeners of her local radio show, Modern Pioneers, and the advice she strives to live by every day. She has fled a bad marriage and rebuilt a life with her children, Claire and Joshua, and their caring stepfather, Bruce. Their love for each other binds them as a family through the daily struggles of making ends meet. But when they received unexpected news that Teresa, only 38, is dying of cancer, their lives all begin to unravel and drift apart. Strayed's intimate portraits of these fully human characters in a time of crisis show the varying truths of grief, forgiveness, and the beautiful terrors of learning how to keep living.

4 editions

DaveNash3 reviewed Torch by Cheryl Strayed

Review of 'Torch' on 'Storygraph'

2 stars

I really liked Wild. I thought that was better written and more compelling. Torch is a similar but not the same I appreciated the distinction between the two. However, in Torch Strayed strings out the drama for too long. For example It takes 60 pages for the mom to tell her kids that she has cancer, I get slowly building drama so she can sketch characters, but it was over done. If I didn't read Wild I might have given this a 4. Its not that Wild took away the drama, but that I know she can do better.

Laura Lemay reviewed Torch by Cheryl Strayed

Review of 'Torch' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I am another newcomer to Cheryl Strayed via the Dear Sugar column. This was my first "real" CS book, and I knew going in that it was her first novel, and very autobiographical.

On the one hand, this is a really dark, harrowing, moving, emotional book. It's about a mother who dies of cancer at 38 and how her family falls apart and does horrible things to each other in the aftermath, and how they start to rebuild their lives and relationships afterwards. A funny fast-paced romp, great for the beach, this book is most assuredly not.

On the other hand: the writing is tremendous. From the pacing, to the structure (multiple 3rd person points of view), to the very real and very complicated characters, to individual sentences, this book is just beautifully crafted. As a writer, I want to sit down with this book and a pencil and deconstruct …

I am another newcomer to Cheryl Strayed via the Dear Sugar column. This was my first "real" CS book, and I knew going in that it was her first novel, and very autobiographical.

On the one hand, this is a really dark, harrowing, moving, emotional book. It's about a mother who dies of cancer at 38 and how her family falls apart and does horrible things to each other in the aftermath, and how they start to rebuild their lives and relationships afterwards. A funny fast-paced romp, great for the beach, this book is most assuredly not.

On the other hand: the writing is tremendous. From the pacing, to the structure (multiple 3rd person points of view), to the very real and very complicated characters, to individual sentences, this book is just beautifully crafted. As a writer, I want to sit down with this book and a pencil and deconstruct how it was put together. It was the glorious writing in this book that kept me reading, even as I put it aside every night saddened and unsure if I wanted to continue reading.

I can recommend it to writers. I'm not sure I can recommend it in general, because it is just so emotionally raw.

Subjects

Patients
Death
Cancer
Mothers
Cancer in women
Women in radio broadcasting
Fiction