(Reviewed by Pat Luboff)
“As they progressed higher, she caught her first unobstructed glimpse of Ama Dablam, the mountain she had come to climb. Sun sparkled off the hanging glacier, and the mountain’s two side ridges seemed to reach out to her in a lover’s embrace. It was the most beautiful mountain she had ever seen.”
I like to read at night before I go to sleep. One of the criteria I measure a book by is: Does it keep me awake? Others are: Am I interested in the story? Do I care about the characters? Am I learning something new and interesting about the world? Do I look forward to going to bed to read it? When I’m finished, do I miss it and wish it hadn’t ended? To all of these questions, the answer for Strange Karma was “Yes!”
Another question I ask is: Am I impressed by the level of writing? The answers to this question are why this book got three instead of four bookmarks. The answers were: yes and no. There were some brilliant sentences and some I could not figure out after many readings. There were exciting action sequences and some parts of the story that were confusing to me and hard to follow.
This is the story of a woman who inherits a family mystery and decides that climbing a mountain near Mt. Everest (aka Chomolungma), where the mystery occurred, is how she will solve it. The author’s brief cover bio states that she has lived and traveled all over the world. The way she paints the various exotic scenes in the story have a definite “been there, done that” authenticity. I really enjoyed learning about the culture, religion, superstitions, and daily lives of the people in Tibet and Nepal. The ideas in this book range from the mundane to the mysterious to the miraculous. The history goes back to Marco Polo and the Silk Road, centuries of monks who meditated in caves and later built monasteries in the mountainsides, and the 1920’s. The geography roams the world; California, England, Tibet, Nepal, China. The heroine is beset by all kinds of dangers from people and the environment. Those scenes are exciting and engaging. The ending is sweet and leaves room for a sequel.
It kept me up and I miss it!
