I received this book as an e-ARC from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to them for the opportunity to read and review this title.


I enjoyed many aspects of this book, specifically related to climbing culture and in particular Mt. Everest climbing culture. I've read a couple of books about climbing and while I have zero urge to do it myself, I have to admit that I find myself fascinated by the people who have that sort of determined mentality.

I feel like this book does a good job discussing Everest and the socioeconomic and environmental effect the climbing craze has on the surrounding area.

It was obvious that the subject was very well researched by the author, which I really appreciated.

My issues with the book, and the reason it doesn't rate higher with me, is that it felt like it wasn't sure what it wanted to be, especially for the first half of the book. There are stylistic writing choices made that just made the text feel very juvenile to me. So many moments where words are strung-together-using-copious-hyphens-when-it-isn't-actually-necessary. There are other moments where phrasesaresmashedtogetherlikethis for a variety of reasons. There are also cases where both methods are present. Now, there are a few cases where this works, but mostly it just makes the text difficult to read for little reason.

So we have this hyper-juvenile text, and then at the 40ish% mark we jump into an intimate relationship with our two main characters that was barely hinted at for the first chunk of the novel. They go from 0-100 in the course of about 5 pages, and it feels just out of nowhere for me. There's like one scene where they share an overly-long glance, but other than that, there isn't much build up to them being obsessed with one another. I think a romantic subplot could work here, but I wish it'd been a little more evenly paced throughout the book.

Where the storytelling really works, in my opinion, is while they are on their climb and actually moving up the mountain. Unfortunately, they don't even get to Base Camp until about halfway through the book, and most of the actual climbing/descending happens in the last 15-20%. There are many moments in this last section that affected me, to the point that I actually cried a couple times at the end of the book. I enjoyed the coming-of-age aspect of this as well, and wish we could've had a bit more of the father/son relationship between Jordan and Tate.

This book explores PTSD and trauma in a way that felt very authentic and sensitive to me and my experiences, but I would be aware going into this book if you are at all sensitive to those things.

All in all, while I enjoyed the story, I wish it had dug a little deeper into the characters and really settled on what kind of tone it wanted to set and what audience it is catering to. I would absolutely recommend this to young people interested in Mt. Everest and everything that goes into climbing.