Yesterday we met again at Paul Miller Park to discuss Grandma Gatewood's Walk, by Ben Montgomery. It was so nice to meet outdoors, for very possibly the last time this year~ and we welcomed a new member to boot! Up next for October is Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.
As always, if you are able to obtain a copy of Frankenstein elsewhere, we would encourage you to do so. Also, we'd like to remind our members to please be intentional about reading through the book club books and returning them to library in as timely a fashion as possible to help us be as efficient as we can in distributing the copies we are able to secure~ we appreciate your help!
To the book!
Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than two hundred dollars. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, having survived a rattlesnake strike, two hurricanes, and a run-in with gangsters from Harlem, she stood atop Maine’s Mount Katahdin. There she sang the first verse of “America, the Beautiful” and proclaimed, “I said I’ll do it, and I’ve done it.”
Grandma Gatewood, as the reporters called her, became the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail alone, as well as the first person—man or woman—to walk it twice and three times. Gatewood became a hiking celebrity and appeared on TV and in the pages of Sports Illustrated. The public attention she brought to the little-known footpath was unprecedented. Her vocal criticism of the lousy, difficult stretches led to bolstered maintenance, and very likely saved the trail from extinction.
I think we all liked this one too. No one declared their ultimate love and devotion to the read, but no one claimed to hate it either. A few mentioned they went into the book just sure they weren't going to like it, but were pleasantly surprised that it wasn't a chore for them to get through it.
We liked Emma Gatewood (other than the part where she fled her abusive husband and left her children behind with him). We thought she was humble, and courageous and inspiring in her own right. We marveled that she walked the Appalachian Trail, in it's entirety, three times, with so little gear, in her 60's. We liked that she didn't seem to complain, ever, and that she kept a positive attitude. It was neat to read about her first hike, what the terrain was like, who she met, how she got by, etc. A highlight for us was at the very end, when the book tells of an abusive husband whose one request on his death bed was that he could see his ex-wife (and victim of his abuse) one more time... she refused. "Good for her!"
On the other hand, there were those that found the book repetitive with too much detail about the terrain and who she met and how she got by~ it felt like reading the same things page after page. We also got a sense that this walk wasn't really all that difficult for Gatewood, and we wondered if that was really believable. One member mentioned the bugs alone must have been just terrible at times, and there was only a mere mention of them, once. We also felt like the book was about 50 pages too long, with those side tangents regarding the auto industry and the like accounting for much of the problem. We didn't think much of Montgomery's writing one way or the other, however, no one was inspired to read anything else of his.
What are your thoughts on the book? Please let us know in the comments below! 👇
Did you enjoy Grandma Gatewood's Walk? Fans of the book also enjoyed, A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson, The Appalachian Trail: A Biography, by Philip D'Anieri, and Wander, by Ryan Benz. All of these titles are available within the Viking Library System~ reserve your copy today!
Would we
recommend this to a friend to read?
"YES"
Would we
recommend this to another book club for discussion?
"YES"
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