Ten and a half hours is what this audiobook asks for, which is an odd ratio for a book about six months on foot. Amanda K. Jaros walked the 2,160-mile Appalachian Trail at twenty-three and made In My Boots out of what happened to her; Theresa Bakken reads it for Black Rose Writing. Thru-hike memoirs are a crowded shelf, and the fair question to put to a new one is what it does that the last five did not. This record has an answer. It is not quite the answer the travel category implies, and the distance between the two is worth knowing before you buy.
Jaros went into the woods expecting solitude. The publisher's description is direct about it: she expected to pass the time in the solitary and peaceful wilderness, reflecting on her life's direction. What she got instead was a moving village, summarized here as stinky socks, buckets of ice cream and trail magic. The route is all present, over the windy balds of the South, through snowstorms in Smoky Mountain National Park, above the tree line into the alpine zones of the White Mountains. But the mileage turns out to be scaffolding rather than subject, and a listener who does not register that early will spend the first hours waiting for a different book.
Underneath the route sits a family. Jaros left a household dominated by an angry and volatile father, and the walk is framed throughout as distance put between a twenty-three-year-old and the compliant, scared girl she had been. That framing is what lets the book carry ten hours. An account that is only a thru-hike runs out of weather around the halfway point; this one always has somewhere else to go, because the trail is doing work on a person who needed the work done. The idea the description closes on, that the path she walks must be her own, reads as a slogan in summary and comes out earned in the telling.
Highlights
Ice cream is doing real work in that description, and it signals the book's temperature. Jaros reaches for small physical pleasures and the people who supply them rather than for elevation profiles and gear lists, and the choice pays off across a long runtime. Rural trail towns arrive at intervals and function like chapter breaks: each one resets the story, brings somebody new into it, and pushes the walker back uphill. The result is episodic without being shapeless. It also solves the problem every long-distance account has in audio, which is that a straight recitation of miles gives a listener nothing to hold on to.
Theresa Bakken carries the whole thing alone, and a first-person memoir written at twenty-three sets a narrow tolerance for a reader. Too much shaping and the voice sounds older than the person it is playing; too little and ten hours of walking goes level. Bakken is credited on this record, and the sample is where you settle the rest. Five minutes at the opening and five somewhere in the middle will tell you whether the pitch of that voice is one you want beside you for a full working day, which is roughly what this runtime amounts to.
Before You Commit to In My Boots
A four-star response filed in March 2026 states the main objection better than a summary could: the book is more about the author's relationships with her family and fellow hikers than it is about the Appalachian Trail. That reader hikes and reads trail books on purpose, so the complaint carries weight, and it is a complaint about genre rather than about quality. The same response then turns to something it dislikes across the whole category, the way books by thru-hikers criticize day hikers, and the text on this record breaks off mid-sentence before it says whether this one is guilty of it.
Distrust the star row. It prints 4.6 above a counter claiming a single rating, and 4.6 is not a value that a single vote can display. Below that same row sit five signed responses of real length. The two figures are describing different populations, and only one of those populations is legible to you, which makes the written column the instrument to use. Black Rose Writing put the recording up in August 2025, so the column is young and still forming. Read it rather than average it, and give the number above it no weight at all.
Is This One for You?
Audience first: this sits narrower than travel and wider than hiking. If you want a coming-of-age memoir that happens to take place outdoors, over 2,160 miles and six months, with a young woman walking away from a frightening house and arriving somewhere she picked herself, it is built for you. If you want the Appalachian Trail as a subject, with terrain, logistics and the mechanics of moving a body north for six months, those elements are present but subordinate, and you will spend real time listening past them.
Two other groups are worth naming. Listeners who grew up managing a difficult parent will recognize the shape of this one within an hour, and may find a long trail an unusually good container for it. Listeners who need a narrator doing voices and incident should look elsewhere, because a solo memoir at this length is an act of company rather than performance. Buy it for the family story and the trail arrives free. Buy it for the trail and the family story will feel like it is standing in the way.
In Brief
- Narration: Theresa Bakken holds a solo first-person memoir for ten and a half hours, with no cast and no incident to hide behind.
- Themes: Thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, leaving a volatile father, the family you find on a long walk
- Mood: Companionable, unhurried, quietly forward-moving
- Verdict: A coming-of-age memoir in hiking boots. Worth it if you want the person more than the mileage.
