Peak By Roland Smith

I recently read Peak by Roland Smith. The main character is a fourteen-year-old named Peak Marcello. He lives in NYC with his mother, his stepfather, and his twin half-sisters, Patrice and Paula. Peak gets caught climbing a skyscraper and is put in a juvenile detention center. At his trial, his real dadthe famous mountaineer, Joshua Woodoffers to take custody of him. Josh lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand and runs a climbing expedition company. Instead of heading straight to Thailand, they go to China. Josh has clients waiting for him on Everest, so that is where the two of them go. Eventually, Peak finds out that one of the main reasons his father took him in was because he wants him to be the youngest person to reach the summit of Mount Everest, which would allow Josh to have enough money to pay off his companys debt. Peak still decides he wants to try for the summit, along with his new friends, Sun-jo and Zopa. The entire story is almost like a journal written by Peak. I liked the way the author wove all of the parts of the story together. For example, in one of the earlier chapters, Peak is

talking about K2 [The highest mountain in the Karakoram range, between Pakistan and China. The second highest peak in the world, it rises to 28,250 feet (8,611 m). Formerly known as Mount Godwin-Austen]. and Sun-jos father. I was interested by this passage, in which he writes, It turned out that Sun-jos father had been a Sherpa. Unfortunately, he had died up on K2 the previous year trying to rescue a group of climbers. Only one of the climbers survived. Interestingly enough, it turns out that the one climber that survived was none other than Joshua Wood, Peaks dad. After the rescue, Ki-tar (Sun-jos dad) died because of a heart failure, in a cot less than four feet away from Josh. There are a lot of situations like this in Peak where seemingly unrelated things end up being connected. Those little elements made the story a lot more interesting and added some suspense. I was very surprised when Peak, Sun-jo, Yogi, and Yash were just about at the summit and Peak decided to not go to the top. He let Sun-jo go so that he could be the youngest to reach Everests summit because he wanted Sun-jo and his family to be able to have a better life. The money would allow Sun-jo to get a good education. Id say that a theme of this book is

friendship and loyaltymainly because of this decision that Peak made. This book reminded me of Three Cups of Tea, which we read last year in Social Studies. Some of the things I learned about climbing in Three Cups of Tea helped to prepare me for this book because I could understand the terminology. Also, Id compare this author to Gordon Korman, who wrote several adventure trilogies, one of which is called Everest. I read this trilogy a while ago, so I cant remember much of what happened in it, but I do remember that the kids in that book went through a lot of the same struggles on the mountain that Peak did. In general, Korman and Smith have very similar writing styles because they use a lot of powerful adjectives and verbs to describe unique situations. Some examples from Peak are: lunge, assaulted, terrifyingly, and slogged. I wish that the author had let Peak reach the summit, but just have him keep it a secret. I think that would have made it really interesting. I still understood why the author chose to have Peak decide not to climb any higher. It emphasized the main theme that he was trying to get across, which was The only thing youll find on the summit of Mount Everest is a

divine view. The things that really matter lie far below. Those were also the last two sentences of the book. The character development was a really important part of this story. Over the course of the book, Peak learned about the importance of friendship and family. He also learned a lot about prioritizing. He discovered that some things are oncein-a-lifetime events that should be treasured. While Peak was developing, readers saw more and more of the important messages the author was trying to get across. Several times Roland Smith showed that you shouldnt always be critical of people because there might be something you dont know/understand about them. The structure of this book was typicalchapters divided into paragraphs. I didnt agree with the authors decision to not number the chapters. I think that this would have made it easier for me to keep track of the events in the story and would have made it easier for me to know how far into the book I was. I noticed how the author chose to make a few of chapter titles have some humor. This was entertaining and kept me interested in the book. If I were the author, I would have been consistent with the type of chapter title. I would have either chosen to make all of them funny or all of them

simply informative. I dont get why the author kept changing the type of chapter title he used. I couldnt understand why the author chose to put a map of Everest at the beginning of the book, and not at the part of the book where it was relevant. Also, why did the map say that it showed Peaks route up Everest, even though it didnt? It showed him going to all the traditional camps to reach the summit, even though they actually camped in different places because they didnt want Sun-jo to be caught by the Chinese soldiers. (They were after Sun-jo because he used fake papers to get into Tibet.) The climax of the plot was when Peak found out he was going to get another chance to climb the mountainalong a secret route. This was definitely something I was not expecting, but it was a really important turning point in the story. Id say the resolution of the main characters problem was when he realized that summiting Everest really wasnt that important and decided to let Sun-jo be the youngest to reach the top of the mountain first. One media connection I would make to this book is the song, Where is the love? by the Black Eyed Peas. I think that this song relates to Peak in a lot of different ways. First of all, it connects to the Chinese officers treating the Tibetans cruelly

and unfairly. There are people who are prisoners there that have to spend all day chopping a boulder into graveland most of them havent even committed real crimes. It also relates to Peak realizing that loving your friends and family is more important than holding some record. This is how I read this book: quickly. I rated this book a 8.5 out of 10 because it had a lot of suspense that kept it interesting. Also, I liked that it didnt have the ending I was expecting. Like I said before, there were a couple things that didnt make sense, though