Cecily Wong is about to get the interview opportunity of a lifetime. She's been handpicked by Charles McVeigh, a famous mountaineer known for climbing alpine style, to write an article about him as a part of his mission to summit all fourteen of the eighteen-thousand meter mountain peaks in the world. But there's one condition: McVeigh won't allow her to interview him until after she summits Manaslu with the rest of his team. Known for its avalanches, dangerous terrain, and unpredictable climate, Manaslu is a challenge that Cecily isn't sure she's ready for -- but with the place she's in at work and financially, she can't say no. Before they're even at camp two, strange deaths start occurring, written off as misadventures caused by hypoxia. Cecily, though, isn't so convinced -- and as she gets higher and higher on the mountain, she soon begins to realize that a murderer might be stalking them as they make the summit push.
I've always been interested in mountaineers. The dangers they face, the extensive preparation they must do both on and off the mountain, the question of what it is that drives people to put their lives at risk. I've never read a book revolving around a mountaineering expedition before, so I was intrigued when I first heard about it, and I was also pleased by the fact that the main character is a biracial woman, half-Chinese and half-white (I feel that, by and large, most thrillers are populated with only white heroes and heroines).
Unfortunately, Breathless did not manage to meet my expectations. It's not the worst thing I've ever read, but there's a lot it lacks -- the writing, for example, is decent, but feels slightly juvenile, perhaps because this is McCulloch's first foray into writing an adult book (all of her others have been middle-grade). I could overlook the simplistic, slightly boring writing style, but what I can't overlook is how boring this book actually is in practice. The concept sounds appropriately thrilling, but the majority of the book -- more than half of it, I'd say -- mainly involves Cecily going back and forth over whether or not she'll be able to summit, and rather uninteresting conversations with the rest of the cast, who come off as shallowly as Cecily does.
The summit push doesn't even come until around the 90% mark; the rest feels like little more than filler. The deaths could be intriguing, but they feel, strangely enough, as if they're little more than decoration. Suspense doesn't really come into it, at least not until the very end. I would be remiss not to mention that Cecily continuously makes such such stupid, poorly thought out decisions that it was hard to root for her at all. Her naïveté is, frankly, astounding. She brushes so much off simply because she likes the people involved, or thinks they seem courageous or interesting. She almost seems to possess no journalistic sense of curiosity or skepticism whatsoever.
All in all, I wouldn't recommend this, particularly to people who are already big fans of the suspense/thriller/mystery genres.
No comments:
Post a Comment