Crux is an emotionally powerful story about the friendship between two teenagers who dream of escaping their Mojave Desert small town to become rock climbers.

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Teenagers Dan and Tamma want nothing more than to escape their small town lives in a forgotten corner of the California desert and follow their dream of becoming dirtbag rock climbers. But while Tamma has been living a hard scrabble life in her verbally abusive mother’s trailer, abandoned by her physically abusive father, and with no one thinking she has any potential at all, Dan has been living a relatively privileged life. He feels pressure from his parents to become the first in his family to go to college; they don’t approve of his friendship with Tamma, but he only feels alive when he’s with her and climbing. While Tamma doesn’t really have many options to create a better life for herself, Dan does – he’s a good student with loving and supportive parents – and that tension forms a lot of his character journey. 

Tamma is a unique character. I didn’t like her at first – she’s foul mouthed, crude, and doesn’t seem to care about anyone or anything other than Dan (platonically – she’s gay) and rock climbing – but she has a vibrant energy and turns out to be surprisingly capable, hard working, and devoted when her sister and Dan need her. I found a lot of her dialogue to be really unrealistic, overwritten, and kind of obnoxious, but it ends up being so perfect at a pivotal point in the book that I grew to like her. 

Through their pursuit of rock climbing and their daily struggles in life, Tamma and Dan both explore if they have what it takes to pursue their dream – and if it’s even still the right dream for each of them as their senior year of high school progresses. 

The friendship between Tamma and Dan is the soul of Crux and it’s beautifully portrayed – but there are a lot of long jargon-y, technical passages about rock climbing that are so tedious to read that I almost gave up on the book. I’m glad I kept reading because I did end up enjoying the story and Tamma and Dan’s character journeys but the pages and pages of climbing detail really took away from it for me. 

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher Riverhead for the ARC.