After reading The Sunset Route, I may never pass by a person who appears to be following an obviously different path than my own without wondering what story they have to tell. At least that is how I feel after turning the last page. I want this memoir to be a best seller. It must be a best seller. It deserves to be a best seller. I marvel at what a talented writer the author is. Her story is a thrilling adventure of childhood, counter culture, riding the rails, and pushing one’s body to it’s limits. The story does not lag for an instant and is the best book that I have read in a very long time. Surprisingly, I don’t know what drew me to requesting this read and I am not sure that it is something that would have been on my radar but I will preaching about it to whom ever I can. Do not miss it. Cannot thank The Dial Press and Net Galley enough for giving me this experience.

Riding the rails is not something you think of women doing ever much less in this day and age but that's exactly what she did! She left her tumultuous childhood behind and took it on the road. I loved the punk/low income parts that is much more like my experience (although not this extreme) than the soccer moms and doctors I encounter in so many books.

A raw and poetic account of Carrot Quinn's triumph over the existence she was born into, by turning it into a life she wants.

The Sunset Route is a memoir in nonlinear flashes. Carrot Quinn takes us along for the ride of her tumultuous life so far. Quinn shares memories and experiences that are hard to read at some points (perhaps more for some readers than others). Quinn's mother struggled with untreated mental illness, causing her and her brother to live in extreme poverty—wanting for food, heat, stability, and love.

After escaping her childhood living situation, Quinn zigzags us through a variety of formative times in her life. Her living situation changes again and again, she discovers new passions, tries on bits and pieces of identities of those she admires along the way until her personal identity takes shape, and she lives with extreme resilience. Quinn spent much of her time traveling, which fills this book with vibrant snapshots of hitchhiking and freight train riding before touching on her love of thru-hiking.

It's difficult to share some of the most dynamic passages without spoiling Quinn's story. I felt her prose strengthened throughout this text, and by the time I finished, I missed it. Much like a freight train, it had a bit of a slow start for me, but once I was up to speed, I thoroughly enjoyed this whirlwind of a memoir. It made me want to repurpose, travel, and hold my loved ones close, and to me, that's a pretty good outcome.

This is a beautiful memoir. Its a very heartbreaking story of a young girl (Carrot) growing up in Alaska in poverty and sometimes homelessness with a mother who is mentally ill. She eventually runs away from home and travels by train hopping ( which is illegal} to travel from one place to the next. Throughout her journey she shares the struggles and hardship she endured to survive.
I highly recommend 4.5 stars.



Thank you NetGalley and Random House for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

neglected kid becomes train hopper and wilderness.

The book is conversational and details consequences of choices, good and bad.

Thought provoking, mostly melancholy details of experiences many people are not equipped to live themselves.

Carrot Quinn's moving, often beautiful memoir of a neglected kid-turned anguished punk train hopper-turned thoughtful distance hiker is unlike any other book I've read. Written in episodic chapters and long interlinked vignettes, the structure or un-structure suggests the shape of the life it describes, of choices made and accidents endured against a backdrop of trauma, never quite falling into the few available patterns for such a story: victim's tale of woe or redemptive hero's quest. The quality of Quinn's prose and the painful precision of recollection and the narrator's (too sparing) insight makes this work. Well enough to recommend, anyway. That is to say, when it's good, it's powerful stuff. The movement in time, the swerving from crystalline focus to a year-long or decade-long blur, match the combination of nonsense and revelation characteristic of traumatic memory. Even in the book's poorly edited passages (where prior information is summarized for the second or third time, and the monotony of train-riding is uncomfortably underscored by a series of near-identical journeys), it's easy to lose time, rocked by the rhythm of the losses and triumphs of this vintage form of wandering, wishing even as the narrator bends away for another layer of closeness with the newest passing friend or lover. Each time another name is added (Willow, Plant, Florence, etc), however, the glow of the narrator's idealization blurs the new features into the previous ones, hosts into housemates into coworkers, friends, lovers, until this light too joins the constellation overhead, becoming only more perfect and inaccessible with increasing distance.

From a less well-examined mind that could be the book's undoing. Quinn is evidently well-acquainted with the flaws in any dream. When the narrator analyses her situation, annhilating loneliness is revealed as a tide barely kept at bay. Any specific want from another person, such as the unspoken attachment to what seems like (???) a first, adult love, threatens to uncork an ocean's worth of unmet need.

When the memoir directly addresses it, the drama of emotion renders a casual goodbye between travelers into bloody contrast. The nomad's open road in these moments shrinks to a confining shell, a burden ever dragged through the dust of industrial neighborhoods and unpeopled fields, beauty and love made fearful with presence and real with loss.

An exception to these idealized relationships is a friendship with another traveler, a sometime-sex worker gone north to subsist in a diamantine. Here, the relationship goes deep enough to threaten both vulnerable participants, and this time it is not Carrot who flees. In perhaps a healthy choice for the friendship but a disappointing one for the book, the details of this fracture are elided, as are the years that follow.

The resonant final chapter seems to argue poetically for the cohabitation of trauma and healing. It's an affecting resistance to the ted-talkable shtick about overcoming adversity that we all know so well. Hiking is no more a salvation than train-riding was, the current batch of barely sketched companions warm bodies, but temporary ones. Yet this narrator is strikingly different than that of earlier sections, implying that walking forever into the sunset (couldn't resist!) need not be running away. It can be, for Quinn may be, the truest way of being present.

If there's a patness to this ending, it's in those skipped years--a leap from Quinn's solipsistic twenties to her self-aware thirties, from a childhood prolonged by deprivation to a adulthood of the author's own forging. It's disorienting and feels unfair to have traveled so far with this narrator only to be abruptly left on the roadside. Still, impossible to forget even then how rare and bold a story this is, gaps and rough edges and all.

Special thanks to Random House and Random House Publishing and NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

I have to say, I love a good book where there is about young girls, escaping their homes because of abuse or just plain insanity and make it on their own without money or a place to stay. This book is about just that! It's about a girl living with a mother who is not all there and when her daughter finally leaves with nothing, she lives of the land. Learning how to survive with nothing, she gets her food from the land, foraging and riding on train cars to get from here to there. Author Carol Quinn describes the wilderness and countryside to chilly places with a deft hand.

But people who leave their homes can make it outside, but can it heal their insides and their heart from living a traumatic life? What happens when they go back? Can the reason why they left ever heal them by going back someday. I loved this book. I loved the desperation and the knowledge and description of living without a home, and the elements and how to endure without a roof over your head by choice. 5 stars.

This is a memoir about grief and neglect, and about being a lost, poor, young, white woman in America—a spiritual successor to Kerouac but more soberly written. I've read both of this book's comps, and though aimlessness is arguably thematically appropriate, this memoir's most prominent shortcoming is its comparative lack of drive. My review is mixed: it is a personal read about hard topics, and there's a story here worth telling full of adventure. It taught me a lot about riding the rails. But a number of elements didn't work for me—the shortage of narrative reflection in the text and structural issues had me skimming through significant swaths, while the lack of significant direction meant the story ended without a strong sense of closure. You could feel potential here, but it never quite actualized for me.

This memoir was strongest in the middle. You can tell it was fleshed out from a shorter work, which created some pacing and structural issues, as well as a bit of a haphazard narrative drive. The structure of the book plays with time in more than one sense: it is a nonlinear narrative, but even when we're in a linear section, time blends together—days, weeks, or months pass without much remark. This is both one of the more interesting things about the memoir and the area that left me the coldest: often I wished there was some editorializing on the experiences to give a stronger sense of time, of reflection, a deeper delve into the significance of what was on the page. In places, it read a bit like an accounting of what happened, a more direct transliteration from journal to narrative memoir. Accordingly I had a hard time pulling out specific instances of significance and, at times, was lulled into the drudging rhythm of misery that sometimes pervades modern literature.

That said, I too was once a young, lost, white woman on the west coast, so there were elements of this story that spoke to me. There was one particular moment of grace that I wish had been drawn forward and given greater narrative significance: the book nearly begins and ends in Alaska (I wish, for thematic reasons, it had begun and end in Alaska). Near the end, the narrator, now an adult, is looking for her mother after two decades away from her, having traveled the country and fended for herself. This was a brilliant bookend, and was the first moment in the memoir I had a sense of a cohesive story and connectivity. If more had been textually made of the idea that these travels were spent looking for something, only for the book to begin and end in the same place, it would have felt like the story and misery had a greater sense of direction. As it is, there didn't feel like there was a ton deeper than what was on the surface: an accounting of events.

It's hard to rate a recounting of a person's experiences. I found the protagonist's troubles and reactions relatable—the way she throws herself against the world looking for someone who will love her is heart-rending and the definite guiding light of the book. But the format didn't quite serve the story, and its strongest beacons are somewhat buried under procedural elements and a peculiar sense of time. Notably, for a book with 'freedom' in the title, I felt the narrator spent most of the book being demonstrably unfree—diving more into the idea of "freedom," exploring it, and troubling it is one of the things I felt was missing in this book.

Come to this book for the adventure narrative and don't, unlike me, think about its bookness too hard, and it's a quick, emotional read—a different perspective on America written in easily digested prose.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dial Press for the ARC.

Gorgeous, honest, raw and beautiful memoir! Set in Alaska and then traversing the United States, the author, Carrot Quinn, recounts a life filled with hardships and cruelty that was hard to read but she juxtaposed the ugly with the beautiful to create a breathtaking book.

Thanks to RandomHouse and NetGalley for this wonderful book. I’m grateful.

I am a big fan of Carrot Quinn's writing about her outdoor adventures (I love thru-hiking will break your heart). This book was a much harder read. It's a much more sad subject matter and although Carrot is a great writer I had a harder time getting into the groove of this one.