Breathless

Book Reviews

Jun 21

Breathless
By: Amy McCulloch

“You never know when a mountain will turn on you. It’s not just your own life you put at risk up there.”

“There were even more ways to die on the mountain than she had imagined.”

How would you like to be a vulnerable mountain climber on a precarious peak with not only natural dangers to worry about, but a murderer?!

That’s where Cecily finds herself in Breathless.

But who is it and why won’t anyone take her seriously? Is it just altitude sickness affecting her judgment?

Let’s just say… you’ll want to take a peak at this book…

The Plot

Cecily, a journalist and inexperienced climber, has joined Charles McVeigh’s climbing team. If she summits the mountain with McVeigh she earns herself an exclusive interview which will finally kickstart her career.

McVeigh is doing the impossible— “climbing the only fourteen mountains in the world that stood taller than eight thousand meters without using supplementary oxygen, alpine style— and all within a single year.”

Manaslu, in Nepal, is his final summit.

But both mysterious deaths and harrowing rescues follow in McVeigh’s wake and Cecily sniffs out a darker story at play.

Can she figure it out before she’s next?

Interesting Background

As I was reading this one I was struck by the mountaineering jargon and the detailed descriptions of what was happening. In these situations I like to figure out what credibility the author has to teach me things about the subject matter.

Author Amy McCulloch climbed Mt Manaslu (the 8th highest mountain in the world) in 2019 and became the youngest Canadian woman to do it.

This book relates closely to a lot of her experiences. You can read more about that in this article.

Reading this book made me really curious about mountaineering and what it’s like to climb these dangerous peaks. I started looking for a documentary that would give me some more visuals to what she describes in the book.

I came across a Netflix documentary called 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible. It’s the story of Nims Purja who decided to climb all 14 mountains over 8000 meters in 7 months.

Sound familiar?!

[Well actually he did it in 6 months, 6 days and broke 6 mountaineering world records! He even climbed a mountain hungover.]

And it turns out, McCulloch was climbing with Nims when she summited Manaslu (before he started his project).

14 Peaks is really interesting and does give a lot of good information and depiction of life on the mountain. And just like Charles McVeigh’s project, Nims did rescue a couple people on his expeditions!

I do wish the documentary would have showed more about how guides ‘fix ropes’ and what the food, equipment, and tents were like, how you actually climb, etc but it was a perfect pairing to watch after reading Breathless! Would recommend.

Comments/Recommendation

As for the actual book, I thought it was pretty good.

It was a little reminiscent of Vertical Limit or Cliffhanger, but it had its own flavor and mystery and I like that the author had firsthand experience to write from.

It gets a little technical and since it pretty much all takes place on the mountain there are parts that feel a little slow or repetitive.

But there was definitely suspense up until the very end.

I’m not sure if I really liked the main character or not, but I’m somewhat biased against journalists in real life so that could be it. Regardless, I was still invested in finding out if there was a killer and if there was, who it was!

And I always appreciate a book that inspires me to google things.

One thing I pondered as I tried to figure this one out was— Okay, yes, a dangerous mountain is the perfect place to kill people and get away with it because people would just assume the person fell and there would be no investigation… but seems like an expensive method of killing and why would you put yourself in danger to also kill?

But then I thought about it some more and for one- people who would kill like this probably don’t have much fear and would be drawn to thrill-seeking type endeavors like mountain climbing. And two- if a person already liked to mountain climb and then realized they also liked to kill people then I guess it is more of a happy (ha!) coincidence that they suddenly had a perfect killing ground and alibi. That makes more sense than someone being a killer and then trying to find the best place to do it and saying- Yeah, I’ll just go on up to Mount Manaslu quick and see who’s around.

So if there is a mountain climbing serial killer, I’ve decided I can accept these terms.

There were a few paragraphs that annoyed me a little bit. I’m guessing because I was just coming off of reading Two Nights in Lisbon that was chock full of these references.

And after reading the afore-linked article, it sounds like these were written from personal experiences:

“She’d seen the way that men on other teams looked at her. Like they were assessing which one of them was going to lay claim to her.”

“That wasn’t in any mountaineering manual. That’s because they’re written for men, by men.”

“‘I think he’s a typical privileged public-school boy and a bit of a creep.’”

“They always think they want an adventurous girl, and yet when it comes down to it they want someone to come home to who will be wowed by their adventures.”

I’m a little bit tired of the whole ‘toxic masculinity’ dialogue. I get that there are some real douchebags out there but I don’t really enjoy reading books where the female characters are preoccupied with looking for it and assessing it in every area of their life.

I will grant McCulloch that being a woman on a mountain largely full of men would be a particularly vulnerable position and women should not have to worry about their safety in that regard.

Anyway.

If you have no interest in a mountain climbing thriller, you won’t enjoy this. But if that doesn’t describe you, I would recommend giving this book a try! I thought it was both suspenseful and interesting!

Fun Facts

Here are some things I found out in my googling.

In order to climb mountains you have to pay for a permit. A permit to climb Mt Everest costs $11,000.
Permits plus other Nepalese fees can make climbing Mt Everest cost $40-50,000 on average and even up to $100,000+! In comparison, to climb Manalsu it runs around $8000-13,000.
Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay were the first recorded ascenders of Mount Everest in 1953.
Manaslu is the fifth most dangerous mountain in the world.
For every 3 people who make it to the top of Annapurna (one of the 14) 1 dies.
Western guides make $50,000 each climbing season but Sherpas only make $4000. (Part of Nims Purja’s intent with his documentary was to use an all Nepalese team and shine light on the amazing Sherpas that so many climbers rely on and the lack of fair compensation)
Hallucinations while climbing mountains are more common than you think. Here’s an interesting article talking about these episodes.
Nims Purja’s climb to Everest on the documentary was crazy to see how many people try to climb Everest every year. After he made the summit he turned around and took the picture below that went viral. I can’t imagine having to wait in line like this while perched on a mountain in the Death Zone!