Review 553: Possessed by Shadows

Possessed by Shadows: A Novel by Donigan Merritt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not entirely sure how I came across this book. Goodreads has only one other review and that’s from the author, so technical no reviews, although there are some ratings. In any case, I did read this slightly short book.

This novel is told in two narratives, two halves of a married couple – Tom and Molly. Molly was just diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. She is still young, mid-thirties and doesn’t want to spend her last days with treatments and hospital visits when it won’t extend her life much anyway. She wants to spend her final days doing what she’s always done, which is climbing. Her narrative is what she wrote about her life, starting not really from the beginning, but sometime as a teenager.

The other side, Tom’s narrative begins with the diagnosis in 1989 and continues forward, so we do have a split with the timeline. They decide to return to Czechoslovakia, to the Tatra Mountains. There they meet up with Tom’s good friend Štefan Borák. Molly’s good friend Saŝa was from a village near Prague, although died a while back in a climbing accident.

Climbing was in the center of the book. In fact there was a glossary in the back to define the various climbing terms, although it seemed to me that the terms were self-explanatory. In Molly’s portion went into explaining how different rocks or routes were named.

This book cannot be called a light read with so much death in the book, with a youngish person facing their own eventual death, plus her good friend, along with her father she was very close to growing up. Yet, it was marginally interesting. Maybe if I was into climbing the book would have worked for me better.