Andra Watkins

The author's style incorporates a lot of imagery, which makes it difficult to follow the beginning of the story. I was 30% of the way through the book before I could easily decipher between the imagery and actual events. By that point, the story was more focused on the walk and less on other people, which may have helped.

From the title, you would expect either a strong relationship between the author and her father at the outset, or that relationship to develop as part of her journey. I didn't read either of those things. Instead, it seemed that her father remained as distant and self absorbed at the end as he did throughout her life. Frankly, the relationship was tangential to the story. From the author's point of view, her father's impact on her journey was about the same as her sore feet.

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In the spirit of full disclosure for this review: (1) I do not think you should spend a lot of time with someone you clearly do not respect, (2) I do not think you should ask someone you clearly do not respect to help you out with a big, lengthy project, (3) I do not think you should walk every day on bloody feet unless you are in great imminent peril with no other choice, and (4) I do not think you should advertise that your book was nominated for the National Book Award when all it takes to get "nominated" is a $135 fee paid by your own publisher allowing about 500 other books in your category to also be "nominated". With that out of the way, here's the deal. The author is a self-described "non-practicing CPA". (I'm a non-practicing newspaper man -- I had a paper route when I was a kid, which I eventually gave up.) She wrote a book -- fictional -- about what happened to Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis and Clark fame, leading to his mysterious death. Apparently, feeling her life as a productive human being will be forever tarnished if she doesn't sell a lot of copies, she decides to walk the length of the Natchez Trace Trail, some 442 miles, to help promote the book sales. She is not by nature a long-distance walker, and she has a terrible relationship with her elderly father, who she asks to help her in her task. She does some training, but apparently not nearly enough, because she comments often about her bloody feet and multiple other ailments, along with her complaints about her father. Part way into recording her daily troubles walking, she starts to insert brief narratives by her father, not clarifying if these are from her imagination or actual statements from her father. She eventually gets to be happier. I think it's partly from the increased book sales and partly from getting tired of always complaining and feeling put upon. But I could be wrong.… (más)