User Profile

Damn, they weren't kidding, that really was a short history of Italy. When we were already onto Attila the Hun in Chapter Three I was like, "oh, so we're gonna be zooming zooming through this, okay!"

As advertised, this was a very broad, very light skimming through multiple centuries of a specific geographic area. It served as a refresher of time periods I've learned about before (Roman Republic, Italian Renaissance), and offered an introduction to others I'm unfamiliar with (Napoleonic era, Years of Lead). Also learned some fun trivia bits, like how cannolis were an Arab-inspired invention from when Sicily was under Muslim control and that the car company Fiat is actually an acronym for Fabbrica Italiana Automobili di Torino. I wish the more recent content was fleshed out a little more, but at least it went up to the COVID lockdowns and how Italy was uniquely hard-hit.

All in all, I got exactly what I wanted out of this book.

Not that this is something I've ever done myself, but you know how timeshare companies will be like, "hey, we'll fly you out to Vegas for a weekend on our dime, all you have to do is sit in on a presentation we'll give you"? Reading this book felt like that, except the sales pitch went on way longer than I agreed to and we never got to the fun stuff that drew me in in the first place.

This book has a fantastic premise that hooked me just from the back-of-the-cover blurb: we got a mountain taller than Everest appearing in the middle of the ocean overnight, we got secret organizations trying to send people to the top, we got environmental survival horror, we got people showing up after being missing for 20 years, we got epistolary, etc., etc. This felt like half The White Vault, half The Left-Right Game, all wrapped up in a Purgatorio reference. So far so good.

You know that dreaded phrase, "show, don't tell"? Well we got a whole lot of telling here and not nearly as much showing as I'd like. When you have such an intriguing mystery at the center of your setting, I kinda don't want everything explained. But we have our hand held and guided through the mystery whether we wanted it to or not.

Also, the entire book being presented as a series of handwritten letters that were never sent? Cool concept, poor execution. It's difficult to buy into that when only the opening paragraph of each chapter addresses the intended recipient of the letters, and then the rest of it just reads like first-person prose and narration. And I'm led to believe that this dude was taking so much time to hand-write all this stuff down while fighting for his life against the elements on the side of a literal mountain? It asked too much of my suspension of disbelief.

It has it's moments, but it spends too much time spinning its wheels and stuck in flashbacks and failed to take full advantage of what a journal during a high-stress expedition could've been.

I'm not big on re-reading books because my TBR pile is big enough as it is, but I feel like I just got tricked into doing so with this one. This fourth book in this series... just re-tells the same story from the third book, almost scene-for-scene, just from a different character's perspective. Maybe it's just because I don't tend to read book series in general, but this feels like a strange approach to me?

Granted, there was a suspiciously convenient deus ex machina moment towards the end of the previous book, and now we finally get an explanation on exactly what happened because we follow the character responsible for it. Kinda wish we didn't need to re-hash all the previous events from the same starting point to learn all that though. Maybe it's for the best that it's been several real-world months since I've read the previous book because I imagine I would've been more frustrated tackling these back-to-back.

In a vacuum, it's a fine piece of sci-fi with literal aliens and scheming and diplomacy, but it did read like YA because our protagonist this round was a literal teenage girl. And to his credit, the author does mention in the acknowledgements that this was a difficult book to write, specifically because he felt that he had already written it (and I as a reader felt like I had already read it). Taken as part of the larger whole however, I'd probably tell people not to feel bad if they skipped this one.

I suck at tying knots and I have a fear of heights, so naturally rock climbing - which combines both those things - is one of my least favorite activities. I do enjoy horror novels however, and seeing a bunch of characters doing something I hate and getting punished for it piqued my interest in a sick sort of way.

The first chapter is kind of a grim after-the-fact postmortem, so we know not to expect any victories from the very beginning. I'm still on the fence about whether or not I respect the book setting the expectation up front, or if I would've preferred the illusion of someone making it out of this story alive, only to have my hopes dashed one by one. If nothing else we get an intriguing narrative question in literally the first sentence the serves to pull the reader in.

I wanna say this was a "wrong place, wrong time" story, but really when the setting itself has such a presence in the events that occur it'd be more accurate to say, "wrong place, and there's never a good time to come here". There's such a sinister, evil energy underlining every scene that even though I feel like I've read about campers lost in the woods before, this still managed to feel unique.

It felt like the characters went a little off the deep end too soon for my tastes, and the central gimmick of a professional rock climber protagonist - while it did come up at times - was underutilized. And I felt that the eerie and confusing elements were effective enough at wearing these characters down that we didn't need all of the extraneous blatantly supernatural scare tactics. Parts of this definitely felt like a campy and tropey 80's slasher flick, but I could've easily seen it going a different, more subtle direction.

At the very least, I learned about a real-world climbing equipment company called 'Petzl', and a... very drawn out and graphic death scene that spanned six pages...