LOVED this book. Nothing had me glued like this since Project Hail Mary and Dark Matter. I love a good adventure, and this was a fantastic adventure. All of the stars.
You get over the fact that Ben’s a surgeon and survival expert pretty quickly because that’s why he and Ashley stay alive at all after the plane crash to begin with. So essentially, instead of “oh sure he just happens to have a knife,” you understand that you yourself would already be dead (“if I’m dead, you guys have been dead for weeks” dwight schrute).
It becomes less of an everyman-survival epic and more of a what-if-Bear-Grylls-and-I-survived-a-plane-crash-together story—and that’s ok, because you realize it would probably look a lot like this.
I haven’t seen the movie, and I’ve heard it ruins something very specific (avoiding a spoiler) so I’m going to say I won’t watch it and then instead watch it very begrudgingly in a few months.
This book caught my attention and held it so much that I read it from 9 pm until 1 am, then again from 5:30 am (when the baby woke up) until I was finished around 8:30 am.
I promptly threw it at my husband and announced, “You have until dinner to read this or I’m telling you the entire thing and spoiling the story which you will love.” He’s very smart, so he read it cover-to-cover immediately as well. He also loved it, although he did a bunch of math like a weirdo to determine how long Ben’s little campstove could have lasted and he swears Charles Martin overestimated.
The Mountain Between Us is more than the survival. It’s not just the backstory. It’s not just the “what if’s”. This book is just a perfect balance of everything that makes you tell yourself “one more chapter” and not put it down. Aside from having a very powerful pro-life message, it also has a very pro-marriage message which you infrequently find in books with any kind of romantic tension. You can truly love and hate the characters because they are real people.
Don’t read this on a plane (I mean, or do, maybe you live on the edge), but I loved every page of this book. And it has a great dog! Napoleon! The writing paces with my favorite slow-down-and-speed-up feeling where time passes endlessly for the suffering character in a paragraph or two, but you can also live in a moment for two full pages. I love that experience. Kudos to Charles Martin. This book is a masterpiece.
