Crux

Hi Bookworms. It’s mid-February already. I hope you all had a lovely Valentine’s Day yesterday. We went out to dinner, which was nice. And lately we’ve been watching the Olympics from skating to skiing to hockey. It’s been good streaming it without the commercials. There’s plenty of action. I’m not sure which has stood out to me the most so far, but the ice dancing competition was quite alluring and close and the Canadian couple of Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier skated so beautifully to a program using the song “Starry Starry Night” to take Bronze. So pleased for them! They’d been skating together apparently since 2011. I wonder a bit what made them choose the folksy, soupy Don McLean song from 1971, but wow they took it to another level, lol.

This coming week we’ll be going to Vancouver, B.C. for a family reunion, so I’m excited about that. We haven’t traveled in a long while. It’s a lovely city and we’ll walk around lots. Meanwhile our doggies will be home so I hope they’ll be good with the sitter. Here is Willow looking mellow now, lol.

I’ll be taking a couple books I have going including Edith Wharton’s 1905 classic The House of Mirth (for my Politics & Prose class) and a nonfiction book by Mark Braude titled The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII. Quite a title right? I had not known about its subjects before — Janet Flanner of the New Yorker and a man named Eugen Weidmann who was a con man and killer apparently. We will see what happens. 

And now I’ll leave you with a review of what I finished lately. 

Crux by Gabriel Tallent / Riverhead / 416 pages / 2026

4.0+ stars. This novel — about two high school best friends Dan and Tamma, who have family strife in their lives and share a love of rock climbing — was a buddy read with Tina over at the blog Turn the Page. It’s a bit jarring at first with its foul teenage language especially from the girl Tamma, but as it went on and I adjusted, I was drawn into their story more and more. 

Dan and Tamma have grown up in the desert, not far from Joshua Tree National Park, where they like to rock climb, steep boulders and peaks. It’s their last year of high school and they’re dreaming up plans of taking off after school becoming dirtbaggers, living and climbing in Utah’s Canyonlands. Dan is a smart honor student type, and Tamma is an outcaste, gay and like a firecracker. Their families are poor and busted and they have a lot of baggage, so you don’t know what will happen to Dan and Tamma and their future. But they work their tails off trying to keep their families going and to be able to climb together. 

Climbing is their one happy place and they’re the only ones who have each other’s backs. Their families and mothers are particularly bad — one has a drug problem, the other severe depression and a heart defect without any insurance. By and by, you come to root for Dan and Tamma with no money to find a way to rise above their situations. Will they be able to live their dreams? This is a gritty novel that navigates lives on the line that lured me with its two main characters and their pact together, which you don’t know whether will be broken.

Others on Goodreads have warned that this novel has a lot of rock climbing and jargon to it. I actually liked these parts. Some is descriptive and beautiful and the rock climbing to me came to be compelling … even though I don’t know much about the sport. There are a couple boulder plateaus in the desert the two characters attempt to scale that are scary and make for good action.

That’s all for now. What about you — have you seen this one and what do you think? Enjoy your week. And happy reading.