“All we gotta do is make it through this year,” Tamma tells her best friend, Dan, at the start of their senior year. The Utah teens dream of heading to Canyonlands National Park after high school to become professional rock climbers, and, in the meantime, spend their time in the nearby Mojave Desert practicing their skills, even though neither can afford equipment. That’s the central dilemma of Gabriel Tallent’s action-packed, emotionally compelling second novel, Crux—a very different yet equally powerful follow-up to his much-lauded debut, My Absolute Darling.
Dan and Tamma’s mothers were once best friends, but for some reason they no longer speak. “It’s some terrible betrayal and nobody will say what,” Tamma says. Dan’s mother, Alexandra, became a highly successful novelist at age 18 but hasn’t written since. She urges Dan to avoid Tamma, whom she feels is “a nasty little girl” and, instead, focus on getting into college and achieving financial security. Meanwhile, Tamma’s mom is busy with her new boyfriend and ignores her family, leaving Tamma to pick up the many pieces.
Amid these challenges, Dan and Tamma remain each other’s emotional bedrock, sneaking out in the early dawn to climb before school, holding flashlights for each other to make climbing routes more visible. Dan muses, “Here they were, walking into the Wonderland, side by side, to undertake something utterly wild. It was a coming-back-alive sort of feeling.”
Tallent’s climbing scenes are beautifully detailed and often dramatic, providing an intriguing framework for a quintessential coming-of-age novel. His narrative style is brisk, full of barbed, believable, ribald teenage banter that addresses the climbing world along with their futures. “How should I conduct my life?” Dan wonders, as he secretly grapples with depression, like his mother. “Do you trust yourself, or do you not?” As the year goes by, personal and family challenges arise for each character, and Tallent nimbly fleshes out both Dan’s and Tamma’s interior lives. A family tragedy further complicates Tamma’s world, which was hardly stable to begin with. Together, the pair take immense risks in the face of undeniable danger, raising the stakes of the novel time after time.
Crux is a gorgeous love letter to the power of dreams and friendship, and Tallent has created characters so real that this unlikely pair quickly captures readers’ hearts. As Tamma puts it, “They had something extraordinary, but that thing wasn’t climbing, that thing was each other.”