SAM by Allegra Goodman

The first half of this book made me anxious, but I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did.  The title character is a petulant child, and she is the chief anxiety producer.  Her single mother, Courtney, is a saint—working two jobs to make sure that her two children have better opportunities than she had.  Sam’s ability to climb door frames inspires her ne’er-do-well father to take her to a climbing gym, and thus begins Sam’s love/hate relationship with climbing.  The narrative recounts Sam’s life until she is about nineteen or so, making this a true coming-of-age novel.  As difficult as she is as a child, she is worse as a teenager, making some very wrong-headed decisions.  The second half of the book becomes much more palatable, as she falls in with a group of twenty-something-year-old rock climbers.  She may not be their peer age-wise, but she is the best climber, and she seems to be making progress toward figuring out what she wants in life.  Lapses in judgment still plague her, though, as does regret regarding her relationship with her father.  The fact that her mother maintains her sanity through all of Sam’s screw-ups is what gave me hope that Sam would find her way to adulthood with her own sanity intact.  Failures can be learning experiences, and Sam has plenty of those on which to build.  Climbing is almost too obvious a metaphor here.  When Sam falls, she dusts herself off and launches herself right back up the boulder.