FOUR TEENS ON EVEREST

LeBlanc’s YA coming-of-age adventure follows four teenagers, a father, and their guides braving the climb to summit Mount Everest.

The story opens 30,000 feet in the air as a small group of teenagers (and one father) fly to Nepal and the adventure of a lifetime: summitting the world’s tallest peak. The young group includes Jaya, the narrator, who has been training for years to climb Everest—she’s already reached the tallest peaks on four other continents. Amy is a high-achiever who is quite literally climbing mountains to please her parents. Their male counterparts, Galen and Logan, are a teenage runaway and the son of a vice cop, respectively. Each youngster brings not only their hiking gear, but also their own emotional baggage. Jaya and her father are attempting to fulfill a promise to the dead mother she never knew, and Amy needs to appease her own demanding parents. Galen and Logan are each without their fathers—Galen’s dad is a lifelong criminal and Logan’s dad was the cop who brought him down, later taking in the criminal’s son and making uneasy, unofficial siblings of the two boys, only to die in a climbing accident (a somewhat heavy-handed narrative development) a mere six weeks before the group leaves for Kathmandu and the Himalayas. At 17 years old, Jaya is trying to become the youngest non-Nepalese woman ever to reach the summit, but her goal is complicated by her feelings for their smoldering guide, Tenzing; the two quickly develop a mutual crush that must be kept secret from Jaya’s father, who insists they be all business. There is another challenger for the distinction Jaya seeks, a Brazilian girl just a few weeks older than Jaya, who—along with her father—throws money around to hire away all the sherpas and hoard the necessary materials to slow Jaya down. Though their teenage dramas feel all too serious to the group of kids, they must soon put them aside in order to survive the harrowing climb ahead, which promises danger from both the mountain and the other humans trying to conquer it.

LeBlanc employs her wealth of expertise regarding the Himalayas to satisfying effect in this novel; her depictions of the local characters and the remote villages they populate are rich with detail, from the local sherpa-brewed beer called “chang” to the terrifying daredevilry on display at the Lukla airport. While some of the plot threads bringing these teens together feel overly convenient—one strains to believe that Amy’s father agreed to all of this after a conversation with an old friend at a high school reunion—the interpersonal dynamics LeBlanc creates between them make up for the literary serendipity of their meeting, particularly the friendship between Amy and Jaya. Though they don’t always speak like teens (“As you know, [Logan’s father] took me in off the streets and treated me like a son. I can understand why Logan resents me,” Galen says), the kids’ emotional development does feel authentic as each crush or glance is treated as seriously as life and death—Jaya’s hunt for her first kiss dominates the opening 100 pages.

A pulse-pounding journey with characters whose dramas come to feel like the reader’s own.