The beginning pulled me in immediately, but it got bogged down in the middle with the giant cast and the switching between timelines. I think the ending had a great payoff, but this needed a lot of editing to tighten it up.

I only made it a half hour into the audio. You can't introduce your "two best friends in the entire world" and then expect me to believe that they don't know that you broke up with your fiancee SIX MONTHS AGO. Those aren't friends. Also it's gross that he keeps touching her when he's the one who broke things off. No thanks.

Krakauer is a great journalist and storyteller and both are on display here, but his subject matter, Chris McCandless, is so self-involved and irritating that even Krakauer's skill could not make him a compelling hero.

My favorite part of this book was when Krakauer was reading the letters he got in from people talking shit about McCandless and how reckless he was. His adventures feel like the kind of thing that only a rich white guy would do--he didn't have any problems in his life, so he read Walden and decided that that was the only route to live a life that matters, and he died because he was young and stupid and vastly overestimated his skills. If only he had decided to care about other people with the same fervor with which he shunned them; he could have been a great light to many.

What a sloppy mess. There were so many characters that had intense storylines that I couldn't even get properly worked up about any of them, because as soon as tension would build in one storyline, the chapter would end and you'd get kicked into the next story and it was just too much. There was SO MUCH telling and lore dropping for the end to a trilogy (which even now Maas is saying there might be a fourth, which I absolutely will not be reading). I really struggled because I literally don't like a single one of these characters, and I think it's because they all had to feel so balanced plot-wise that we never got to spend any time getting to know them. I loved Throne of Glass and ACOTAR because I felt like I knew those characters. I never got that experience in this series. Huge disappointment, definitely her worst book.

"That's what real prayer is, real meditation: to hold your attention to the world like a match, until it catches with the fire of meaning."

Loved this so much as a teenager because the text is illustrated with Cathy's doodles, and it comes with an envelope full of the story's ephemera. It's so fun and makes the story so immersive. There's not a lot of depth to the story and Cathy is definitely an idiot, but it's still fun.

A fascinating idea, but the execution was dull.