This was an interesting book. The writing was very atmospheric and I felt transported to the Texas region. The story was good and addressed many issues one of which was mental illness.
Many thanks to Greenleaf Book Group and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

“Climbing this West Texas mountain, Make the pilgrimage, closest thing on earth to heaven. We all loved him, blessed to call him a friend. His time came too soon, but he was strong ’til the end.”

The West Texas Pilgrimage by M.M. Wolthoff recounts a weekend journey of friends saying goodbye to a dear friend through a pilgrimage to Big Bend National Park in Texas.

While the excessive drinking of the main characters might put some readers off, dealing with loss is different for everyone and the author portrayed how it was for the main character Hunter to deal with the loss of his friend, Ty. The story takes you along the way of a journey of saying good-bye on the endless roads of West Texas, including a small jaunt across the border into Mexico.

It’s a story of loss and depression and how friends deal with it from hunting to eventually hiking a fictitious peak to say their last goodbyes. Wolthoff’s book is well written, keeps the pace going fast. Good books, in my opinion, are defined by how well the story carries without bogging down a reader and Pilgrimage is that kind of story.

One interesting aspect of the book are the 20 questions noted in the Reader’s Guide which helps the reader reflect back on the book and leads them to draw some of their own conclusions. There is even an author Q&A giving insight into how the story evolved.

Readers will be left knowing that the author has a love of the West Texas and Big Bend region. It is indeed a beautiful remote area with long endless roads that lead to the most interesting places. Pilgrimage leads readers along those roads to help friends say goodbye.

I could not finish this book. It was unspeakably boring.

A group of young college friends trek out through the West Texas desert and climb a mountain to lie to rest the remains of one of their close friends who has died at an early age from cancer, leaving a wife and baby and a grieving father, who joins the friends on their quest. The story is loosely based on an actual group of friends who make a similar annual pilgrimage to honour a dead friend. This should have been a far more moving novel than it actually is, but it amounts to little more than a drunken frat party by some very immature young men who drink to excess during the whole escapade and have a cavalier attitude to drink driving and a general disregard of the rules of the road and other road users. This irritated me, as did the author's obsession with the details of what they're all wearing, right down to brand names, what they eat and what they drink. On the plus side the descriptions of the landscape are vivid and evocative and I could certainly see the characters in their environment, but it is neither instructive nor amusing to watch a group of inebriated young men. There are some serious themes underlying their antics, not least because the main character, Hunter, suffers some mental health issues, based on the author’s own experiences, but this aspect of the book was swamped for me by the constant drinking. A shame, as this could have been a moving and engaging novel about grief.