Breathless

I was excited to read this book, however it ended up being a slow read. While it is considered a thriller, it was not fast paced at all and I got bored during points in the beginning. However, it got better as pages turned. I really enjoyed learning about how people actually climb mountains, especially when they can be full of snow. While it took time for me to really get into the story, I still think it was written in a great way and I slowly got invested in it, hence why it’s receiving a 3.5/5 stars.

I'm never climbing a mountain

I did enjoy this book. I did feel like that it took forever to get the good part of the story though. It was a good winter read, but I prefer more of a close ended story. I did enjoy the different setting than I usually read (in the mountains)

I follow a pretty strict queue for my TBR list because I get so many of them from my library (and thank goodness for my library). So many of my books have a due date, so I have to read them before I can get to other books I’d like to read. Because of that, I ended up in a long string of historical and literary fiction, many of them regarding women and their place in the world. When I got to this one in my library queue, I almost did the happy dance. FINALLY a thriller. I love thrillers because I usually can’t seem to put them down. These stories are typically compelling to the point I don’t even want to go to work. I absolutely have to keep going so I know how it all ends. This was not one of those books. I was able to polish it off pretty quickly, but I found the whole thing rather listless. I didn’t feel like Cecily’s character was given enough attention, especially her backstory and why she ended up on this mountain in the first place. While the author touched on previous mountaineering adventures, there doesn’t seem to be enough to warrant a trek up the side of a 26,000+ foot high mountain in Nepal. Even when I got to the end and the entire story was fleshed out, it still didn’t seem like enough to convince me that Cecily had any business being on that mountain. The rest of the ancillary characters were just that: ancillary. Despite the importance some of them played in the story, it didn’t feel like enough effort was put into making them important to the story. McCulloch spent most of the book talking about the sport of mountain-climbing and deaths on mountains rather than telling the story. The basic story wasn’t terrible, but the telling of it could have been far better.

Very interesting!

If you are a climber/outdoors person It’ll speak to you. I enjoyed the vivid detail and suspense.

Cecily Wong Is going to climb an enormous mountain. It’s a risk, but she will have the adventure of a lifetime and an amazing story too if she can do it. Climbing with Charles McVeigh and writing the account of the greatest climber ever is a dream come true. Until accidents start happening. And people start dying. And Cecily Wong realizes that the mountain isn’t the only killer there. You can tell Amy McCulloch has experienced climbing and can tell a great story too. Highly recommended. This is a wild, fast-paced ride. Thank you #NetGalley for the Advanced Reader E-book.

Mountaineering has always been fascinating to me. Realistically, I could never climb a Himalayan peak -- I'm unfit and under 5 feet -- so I live vicariously through books on the subject -- and that's why Breathless caught my eye. It's a murder mystery on Manaslu, the world's 8th highest mountain, and one of the 8000 metre peaks, written by a woman who summited. I got my dose of mountaineering (brb, gotta look up Ranier expeditions), but the murder mystery plot let me down. We focus on journalist Cecily Wong, an adventure journalist and novice mountaineer recruited by famed alpinist Charles McVeigh to record his ascent of all fourteen peaks without oxygen or fixed ropes. Cecily is not your typical mountaineer -- she's a half-Chinese woman who's never summited a mountain before, and she's definitely on the anxious side. I liked her as a protagonist because of this, and I thought she was a very well fleshed-out character. What Breathless excels at is the atmosphere. Amy McCulloch's experience with mountaineering really sold me on the feeling of being in the death zone, dying with every breath and too exhausted to do anything but focus on survival, as well as the trepidation of such a challenge ahead. However, I found the murder mystery predictable and fairly routine for a thriller -- the forces of nature was scarier than the whodunnit. Part of this is the extremities of the setting, so I don't know if it could have been helped with stronger characterization and tension with that plot. If you've read a few thrillers and don't care about the alpinism aspect, Breathless might not stand out, but if you're interested in a mountaineering book set on a lesser-known mountain, then this is definitely an interesting one. Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with an advanced copy in exchange for a review!

This was a decent thriller novel. It’s set on the treacherous mountainside on one of the tallest mountains in the world, and I think that’s why I liked it. It was a different kind of thriller and it did a great job of making me feel like I was there on the mountain. It also didn’t take long for the thrills to start, so that’s great. BUT this got super super petty. Everyone has that “cabin fever paranoia” and it’s weird. I really thought it would have been better if there was better character development or if they made the tragic events feel more tragic, they were just so disconnected. Desensitized. Which maybe is the point? The mountain is harsh, but they’re still human.