48 Peaks: Hiking and Healing in the White Mountains
Cheryl Suchors
ISBN 9781631524738
Price #16.95 ( USD)
At forty-eight years old, Cheryl Suchors—hoping to find concrete successes and a feeling of control as she changes careers and fifty stares at her from the horizon—vows to summit the highest forty-eight peaks in New Hampshire’s grueling White Mountains. Neglecting to consider her flimsy body, scoliosis, bum knee, and fear of heights, she dives into the challenge.
Along the way, Suchors suffers numerous injuries; her hiking buddy succumbs to ovarian cancer; and she endures breast cancer, a mastectomy, chemotherapy, and five years of adjuvant therapy herself. But she always returns to the mountains—and in that connection, she finds spiritual nourishment, as well as a space powerful enough to hold her grief. Over the ten years it takes her to complete her quest, she learns that mastery alone doesn’t satisfy her and control is often an illusion—that she must connect with hiking comrades and with nature in order to feel nourished and enriched. In the end, Suchors creates her own definition of success.
My Review
I believe many of us recognize the value of friendship. This book goes beyond to explore life after loss with a journey in the most rugged mountains in New England.
This is an evocative read which teaches us how the experience of nature assists in the healing process.
I reviewed this NetGalley for She Writes Press.
Cheryl Suchors began writing at age six, when she wrote a play starring her sister and herself. She continued to write poetry until she took a detour through the business world for twenty years. She holds degrees from Harvard Business School and Smith College. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Writer's Digest, City Book Review, Limestone, The Distillery, RE:AL, and HerSports, as well as in the anthology My Other Ex: Women’s True Stories of Losing and Leaving Friends. In her business career she coauthored the book Own Your Own Cable System. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and a plethora of plants; their grown daughter lives on her own. Cheryl continues to hike every chance she gets, most recently in Poland and Canada.
She Writes Press
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