“There is a girl, and her name is Sam. She has a mother named Courtney and a dad who is sort of around, sort of not. He lives ten minutes away, but he is not always home.”
When Allegra Goodman’s new novel begins, Sam is an energetic, curious seven-year-old being raised by her single mother. As her mother struggles to support Sam and her younger brother, she always stresses to Sam the importance of doing well in school so she can go to college, get a good job, and have a more comfortable life.
But what Sam loves more than anything is climbing—shimmying up the doorframes of her house, racing to the top of the monkey bars, climbing trees, even scaling the sides of buildings. And when her often-absent father takes her to a climbing gym, she is hooked. She dreams of becoming a champion, of taking climbing trips with her dad.
As she becomes a teenager and grows toward womanhood, she’s a loner who doesn’t care about being liked. She just cares about climbing. She resents her father’s constant disappearances and her mother’s demands. She’s unsure of how to handle her climbing coach’s attention. And after high school, she tries to figure out whether to follow her mother’s wishes and pursue a degree in accounting, or if she should find her own path.
There are moments of real joy and emotion in this book, as Sam tries to deal with the various emotions and people she encounters. I love the way Goodman writes but at times I struggled to connect with the story.
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