Ascension

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.