So Long as It's Wild

July 17, 2023
A transcontinental trek exposes a couple to gorgeous scenery, menacing criminals, and kindhearted strangers—all while fraying their marriage—in this bittersweet memoir. Jenkins recreates her three-year walk from New Orleans to the Oregon coast with her then-husband Peter in the late 1970s, a trudge that became a public sensation and was immortalized in their joint 1981 bestseller, The Walk West. Here, Jenkins recalls blinding blizzards and broiling heat, trapping alligators in a Louisiana bayou, encountering Colorado bandits who tried to murder her and Peter before being deterred by a passing truck, receiving an escort through the Cascades from a doting preacher, and more. The couple’s worst affliction, though, was each other: they argued constantly and spent a hellish winter snowed in at a cabin in the Colorado Rockies, where Peter bristled at the author’s efforts to edit his prose and called her “a fat ass bitch.” After the trek, the couple enjoyed fame and wealth, and had three children, but their marriage unraveled into a messy divorce and volleying lawsuits in the following decade. The book’s later sections bog down in the rancorous minutiae of marital discord, but Jenkins’s narrative of her epic journey has a cinematic sweep—“hen the sky lit up there was a black funnel in the distance, hanging from thick clouds, spinning like a giant, twisted rope.” It’s an engrossing reminiscence.

September 1, 2023

"What happened to Barbara? She walked across America too," is the question Jenkins answers in her stirring solo memoir. In 1973, Peter Jenkins began a walk from New York to Oregon. En route, at a New Orleans Baptist seminary, he met Barbara Jo Pennell, who was earning her master's degree after an impoverished childhood in the Ozarks. Courtship and marriage followed, and Barbara joined Peter on the western half of the trek, from mid-1976 to January 1979. This book candidly describes the highs and lows of her adventure, including nature's beauty, charitable strangers, near-death experiences, and her husband's verbal abuse while she edited his manuscripts or physically struggled to keep up. Their walk made them celebrities who appeared on the cover of National Geographic and coauthored several best-selling books, although lawyers later tried to discredit Barbara's literary contributions during divorce proceedings. The single mother of three disappeared from the limelight--until now. VERDICT Christian readers and fans of Tara Westover's Educated or Cheryl Strayed's Wild will be captivated by this inspirational journey of self-discovery and reinvention.--Denise Miller

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