Crux

by Gabriel Tallent ★★★★☆

Tamma and Dan are best friends. They share a love of rock climbing, and they use that focused hobby as a way to escape from the challenges of the rest of their lives. Tamma is the daughter of diner waitress, a single mother who loves to blame Tamma for everything that's wrong with her life. Dan's home life is marginally better, and despite a disconnection between Dan and his parents, there is still love there, albeit muted. Dan's family also struggles to make ends meet, but his parents' only hope is that he can escape their ramshackle town near Joshua Tree, California and be the first among them to go to college.

Tamma and Dan's past is more intertwined than their friendship, however. Back in the day, Tamma's mom Kendra and Dan's mom Alexandra were best friends until a falling-out left them refusing to speak to each other. For a brief moment in time, Alexandra was a world-famous author; but her life was derailed by a heart condition, one that wiped out her life savings. Now she spends most days locked in her bedroom, depressed, and Dan is left to fend for himself.

Crux follows the pair during their final year of high school as they try to navigate lives that feel predetermined on paths neither wants to embark. Despite his academic talent, Dan has no interest in attending college. Tamma wants nothing more to leave behind her downtrodden life, but all signs point to her never being able to escape. Nevertheless, she possesses a boundless energy and positivity, to go with an x-rated mouth and bravado for days. As Dan puts it, "He loved everything about her. Everything about her was dear to him. This girl: graceless, frolicsome, and indestructible, like you'd imagine a newborn moose might be. She was just full of hope. Her hope was a thing you could feel."

This isn't a romance, though. Tamma is a lesbian—at least she thinks she is—and she has no romantic interest in Dan, nor he in her. They are each other's rock in their turbulent lives, lives that get even more topsy-turvy over the course of the book.

And then there's the rock climbing. There is a lot of rock climbing jargon and technical terminology in the book. If you're a climber, this will make sense and you'll be drawn in; if you're not, some passages may as well be in a foreign language. Crux, beta, send, crimp, jug, flash...they're all presented to readers supposing they are as knowledgeable about rock climbing as our two young protagonists. It's decipherable, but it's specific and technical. If you're not into rock climbing, it will be hard to love some of those sections and to fully imagine what the pair are doing.

Despite Tamma's indefatigable energy and positivity, Crux is more of a downer than not. It's an interesting deep dive character study, and it evoked memories of movies like Sling Blade or even Napoleon Dynamite — a rural setting, a depressing home life, and characters just trying to persevere. Author Gabriel Tallent does a nice job contrasting the lives of Tamma and Dan; while both may seem hopeless, Dan recognizes that he has far more going for him than Tamma, something he finally comes to grips with partway through the novel:

“You grew up hand in hand with her, he was thinking, and so you thought there was parity. You believed that both of you saw the world the same way. But...you had another future laid out before you. Tamma had nothing. You grew up with security and material wealth....Your folks were readers, and hers were not. Tamma lived in a trailer, and you in a handmade little house. Even just the way the families talked, the language they used, bore these differences. It was all that, and it was something more—your parents fundamentally believed that it was possible for you to go out into the world and succeed. That belief was built into your worldview. No one had ever believed that about Tamma. Tamma believed it about herself, against all evidence, contrary to everything she had ever been told, believed it provisionally, desperately, and it was an enormous psychological labor to keep that belief alive. You two walked out together—you, hoping to escape a mild feeling of aimlessness with which you were sometimes afflicted, and Tamma, fighting for her life.”

Tamma is a force of nature, and you badly want her to catch a break. At the same time, there are long monologues by both characters which at times feel wholly unrealistic. Seventeen-year-olds simply don't engage in multi-paragraph run-on monologues like "the cultural hegemony of penile-vaginal intercourse and an attendant emphasis on avoiding sex until marriage arose as a way to structure intimacy so as to preserve the generational wealth of the elites, creating a hierarchy of relationships, a framework in which romantic love was valorized, and other relationships—like friendships, or homosocial relations, which may or may not have had a sexual element—were devalued". Stuff like that bumped me and made Tamma and especially Dan feel more like caricatures or shells for Tallent to use to pander on about topics. While Tamma was as true to herself as any fictional character you'll meet, the novel somehow still seemed to feel inauthentic too often.

It's engaging, and sad, and interesting, but I didn't love it. It's hovering somewhere in the 3.5-star realm for me: a better-than-average character study, but with gaps that prevented me from fully connecting to the characters and the novel as a whole.

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Quick Facts

• Title: Crux

• Author: Gabriel Tallent

• Publisher: Riverhead Books

• Release Date: January 20, 2026

• Format: Audiobook

• ISBN-13: 978-0593714201

• Pages: 413