The Path You Make by Kym Wilson (3 ★)

The Path You Make: A woman’s search for purpose walking the Via Francigena from Canterbury to Rome by Kym Wilson

As someone who has a dream of walking the Via Francigena one day I expected to absolutely love this book and I was disappointed that I did not. Maybe Kym just used up all the interesting bits in her blog posts (which I haven’t read yet) but I just really didn’t feel like anything was happening for most of the book. Yes, that it to be expected in a way in a memoir about walking long distances every day, but I’ve read quite a few by this point and there just weren’t really a whole lot of descriptions about… anything.

Not very much about the scenery other than vague generalizations, and once in a while getting uncomfortable walking on busy roads, she didn’t go into detail about most of the places she stayed, didn’t seem to visit the cities almost at all, and the most common descriptions of the lodgings were whether or not they had a heater (which to be fair, is good to know). I have read other memoirs of the Via Francigena that gave very detailed listings of what they ate, what they drank, what they saw and visited in the cities, how they arranged lodgings and how much they paid for them, events and mishaps while walking, describing the scenery and tasting food along the trail. Very little of that happened here. The best parts were towards the end when she finally met up with other pilgrims and at that point their little dramas and camaraderie added some kind of substance that the rest of the book seemed to be lacking.

In the absence of that, I would expect the book to be filled with much more introspection or narration about her life, and there is some of that, but the only parts that really stood out to me as memorable were her relationship with her mother and her unhappiness with her job. That’s it. This book was just lacking a richness of detail that would make reading about someone walking every day for 3 months straight something worth writing a book about. I love the author (I’ve listened to her on podcasts) and think this trip was incredible and I’ll still check out her blog posts, but this book really didn’t do it for me in the way I was expecting. It’s a personal journey and this didn’t feel like an intensely personal book, it was kind of just a summary, and not even a daily one at that. 

Rating: ★★★
3/5 Stars