PUBLICATION DATE: APRIL 1, 2008

n High Places by Tom Morrisey starts out as a story about a boy and his father banding together after the death of a loved one. Father and son decide to relocate and open up a climbing shop together in a new state with a fresh set of odd characters to interact with. Patrick Nolan attempts to look after his father as they both try to make sense of the sudden death. His father turns to mountain climbing to escape his grief, and for a time Patrick joins him until he finds that a friendly smile from the pastor’s daughter seems to be the perfect fix to ease his pain.

The story is told as a fictional memoir through the eyes of an older and wiser Patrick Nolan looking back on the decisions of his youth. The author did a commendable job of keeping true to Patrick’s youthful voice in the dialogues, and appropriately aging the narration to reflect the wisdom that passing time provides. As nearly all stories about teenage boys, this one becomes (for a significant period of time) a story about a girl. Details of meeting his first love pinpoint the piques of an adolescent’s ascent into normal life once again. The girl is, by today’s standards, uniquely conservative and set on following God’s course for her life. This course involves courting, not dating, which is a stretch for young Patrick. It is an odd thing to watch a non-Christian teen boy attempt to conform to a more conservative way of life. However, many of the struggles that could have been illustrated were not, and I found that to be a hiccup in the flow of the book’s believability.

While this book does have much to offer in the way of a cohesive story, an additional element is brought to the table by way of offering mountain climbing as a heavy metaphor for the journey that Patrick finds himself on. Life lessons are punctuated with anecdotes from climbing manuals at the beginning of each chapter, lending a hint of what to expect in the few pages to come. The painstaking detail to which mountain climbing was described made me feel that by the end of the book, I could at least keep up with the lingo of mountain climbers and understand exactly what was happening at each ascent. The specifications of the climbs were detailed in a way that I felt the emotion of the story arc was not. While this may be the way of teenage boys, in the end I found it to be slightly off-balance.