Torch

"Be incredible!" That's the advice Teresa Rae Wood gives the listeners of her popular local radio show, Modern Pioneers!, a kind of hippie Praire Home Companion. Teresa has taken the advice to heart in her own life. As a teen mother and abused wife, she escaped with her two children to rural Minnesota, fell in love with a local carpenter, and raised good kids, Claire and Joshua. Then, at only 38, she receives the devastating news that she is gravely ill. In just a few weeks, she is gone. The award-winning writer Cheryl Strayed creates from this shattering experience a novel that reviewers have called "an unforgettable read" and "a hauntingly beautiful story" that "shimmers with a humane grace." * Infused with compassion and surprising humor, Torch takes a refreshingly unsentimental view of a family reeling from crisis. Claire drops out of college to devote herself to keeping her mother's memory alive back home. Joshua drifts out of high school and into trouble, keeping his grief silently private. Suddenly thrown into adulthood, they struggle to figure out how to connect in this new, unthinkable situation. Their one remaining ballast is Teresa's gentle common-law husband, Bruce. When Bruce announces news of his own plans, it comes as a shock not only to Claire and Joshua but also to the townspeople who have watched this unusual family grow and have come to love them. Cheryl Strayed has a deep appreciation for the shifting rhythms between siblings and parents and for the beautiful terrors of learning how to keep living. The wonderful characters in Torch come alive and stay with you long after the novel ends. *Library Journal; Kirkus Reviews; Publishers Weekly Cheryl Strayed's award-winning stories and essays have appeared in more than a dozen magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, Allure, Self, The Sun, and Nerve. Widely anthologized, her work is featured in The Best New American Voices 2003 and has been selected twice for The Best American Essays. Raised in Minnesota, Strayed has worked as a political organizer for women's advocacy groups and was an outreach worker at a sexual violence center in Minneapolis. She holds an M.F.A. from the Syracuse University Graduate Creative Writing Program. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two children.

Review :
"[Strayed] goes fearlessly into this place of raw grief and inappropriate lust and desperate love . . . [her characters] live dense, perplexing, fascinating, and authentic lives." --Book World "Strayed writes fierce truths about how we live, [with] compassion, humor, and uncanny precision." --Sandra Scofield "ÝStrayed¨ goes fearlessly into this place of raw grief and inappropriate lust and desperate love . . . Ýher characters¨ live dense, perplexing, fascinating, and authentic lives." --Book World "A hauntingly beautiful story written with tenderness and endowed with true insights into the frailty of relationships." "A literary balm for those who know what it means to lose a parent." "Beautifully written and authentic in its portrayal of the unexpected fallout a family death can engender." "Cheryl Strayed proves a master of the little and the big, the telling details that cement the book's larger themes in mind and memory . . . an irresistibly engaging debut read." "In language that's lyrical and haunting, Cheryl Strayed writes about bliss and loss, about the kind of grace that startles and transforms us in ordinary moments." --Ursula Hegi, author of Stones from the River "Shows how death can untie, and hopefully, in time, affirm, familiar bonds." "Strayed knows how to balance the heartache with humor, and the spiritual with the mundane, to create characters you begin to know like friends." --Pages "Strayed writes fierce truths about how we live, Ýwith¨ compassion, humor, and uncanny precision." --Sandra Scofield "This book is a wonderful and heartening accomplishment." --George Saunders "Torch is a steady stream of finely wrought portrayals of nuance, moments, and emotions." "We know these characters so well and with such intricate understanding that their lives belong to us in a way that is the rare gift of fiction and a particular triumph of Strayed's wise and beautiful novel." --Susan Richards Shreve Strayed proves a master of the little and the big ... an irresistibly engaging debut read. "I loved the honesty of this novel, the way it looked at every aspect of loss and recovery -- the pain, the joy, the absurdity, the anger, the despair, the hope and the great beauty -- without every holding back." --Elizabeth Berg "A deeply honest novel of life after catastrophe, of intimacy lost and found." O, The Oprah Magazine "Beautifully written and authentic in its portrayal of the unexpected fallout a family death can engender." People Magazine "In language that's lyrical and haunting, Cheryl Strayed writes about bliss and loss, about the kind of grace that startles and transforms us in ordinary moments." --Ursula Hegi, author of Stones from the River "Lovely." Entertainment Weekly "A literary balm for those who know what it means to lose a parent." The Oregonian "Shows how death can untie, and hopefully, in time, affirm, familiar bonds." The San Francisco Chronicle "Cheryl Strayed proves a master of the little and the big, the telling details that cement the book's larger themes in mind and memory . . . an irresistibly engaging debut read." Minneapolis Star-Tribune "[Strayed] goes fearlessly into this place of raw grief and inappropriate lust and desperate love . . . [her characters] live dense, perplexing, fascinating, and authentic lives." --Book World The Washington Post "Torch is a steady stream of finely wrought portrayals of nuance, moments, and emotions." Newsday "A hauntingly beautiful story written with tenderness and endowed with true insights into the frailty of relationships." Kirkus Reviews "We know these characters so well and with such intricate understanding that their lives belong to us in a way that is the rare gift of fiction and a particular triumph of Strayed's wise and beautiful novel." --Susan Richards Shreve "Strayed knows how to balance the heartache with humor, and the spiritual with the mundane, to create characters you begin to know like friends."l