"They're poor. They're unpopular. Their families are a wasteland. But they have each other and their great shared passion: trad rock climbing. Whenever they can, they head to a climbing route sometimes a boulder at the edge of a disused parking lot, sometimes a cliff an hour's hike into a national park and climb, often with no gear but their bloodied bare hands and tattered shoes."
"At its heart, it's a sports novel, and Tallent's prose here is precise and often exquisite, inching through a few seconds of movement in a way that reflects the unforgiving nature of climbing. We get a lot of closeups of granite and faint half-moons in rock that suddenly become the world's numinous edge. The language of climbing a dialect of brainy dirtbags is a gift to the writer."
Tamma and Dan, both seventeen, grow up in a California desert town stamped by strip-mall nihilism, poverty, and fractured families. Their shared obsession with trad rock climbing drives them to boulders at disused parking lots and cliffs an hour's hike into a national park, often climbing with bare, bloodied hands and tattered shoes. Language focuses on precise, close seconds of movement and numinous rock detail, while climbing jargon and playful route names establish subcultural texture. Landscape descriptions register desert lilies, tarantulas, and windblown sand. Scenes oscillate between moments of majesty, mediocrity, and occasional bathos. Tamma appears as a foul-mouthed, big-hearted urchin who revels in dangerous routes.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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