Everest: book one: The Contest

Title: Everest: book one: The contest
Author: Gordon Korman
Publisher: Scholastic
Place and year of publication: U.S.A, August 2002
Number of pages: 138
Where I found the book: School Library

The Contest is the name of the book and it is book 1 of the Everest trilogy. The story takes place in Summit Athletic Sports Training Facility in High Falls, Colorado located in Rocky Mountains, another location was a mountain named Lucifer’s claw in Alaska. The story dates to a couple of years back. The reason the book is named The Contest is because there is a contest
between 20 candidates and of the 20 only 4 will be chosen to climb Everest, the people in the story are excited to enter this competition because they will be the youngest team to ever climb Everest. The main characters are Dominic, there’s Chris, his older brother, Tilt Crowley, a ruthless poor boy, Bryn Fielder, Samantha Moon, a fearless 15-year-old, and Perry Noonan. The Theme of this book is always aim for the highest and never give up. When you think there is no way out, find ways to solve it.

Dominic, 13, has won one of five wildcard spots for a four-week intensive boot camp competition in Colorado while his older brother, Chris, was already attending because he is second best climber in the country. 15 people are chosen by Cap Cicero (The leader of the expedition and world famous climber) and the other 5 are entered from winning a contest sponsored by Summit Athletic fuel juice, this is how Dominic entered. When Chris and Dominic went to the training facility in Colorado they were amazed of the extra ordinary training facility along with the other 17 climbers. The reason of having only 19 people was because Cap was reserving a spot for 16 year old boy who has already climbed Everest; his name was Ethan Zaph also known as the Z-man. So Cap’s job was to choose 3 kids out of 19 to climb Everest and he would do that through boot camp. The boot camp was so intense that few people quit on the first day. Every week Cap would choose 3 to leave the team. It came down to Chris (Dominc’s older brother), Bryn Fielder (the country’s top female alpinist), and Perry Noonan, whose billionaire uncle is footing the bill for the entire expedition and the Z-man. However, Tilt, Dominic, and Samantha where going back home. While Tilt, Dominic, and Samantha where riding the car back to the airport, they turned on the radio and heard that Ethan Zaph was joining another climbing team so they went back and told Cap about the change.

When cap heard this he was outraged and now he had to pick Tilt, Dominic, and Samantha.
Cap chose Samantha to take Ethan’s place. So now Perry, Sammi, Bryn and Chris are in the original team. The team changed for many reasons like Chris Alexis was kicked off because he was too old and he wouldn’t beat any records so Dominic took Chris’s spot. Cap thought they were now ready for real practice, so he took them to Alaska in a mountain called Lucifer’s claw. Cap was there to make sure they were doing everything right. When they got high up they would set up tents and sleep there for the night. While everyone was in deep sleep, Perry couldn’t sleep, so he got out the tent to take a breather at 2:30am and while he went out he saw Bryn walking towards the cliff. He tried to stop her but she kept walking and fell off. Perry panicked and woke up the whole team. He told Cap that she had fell off and Cap went down to save her with the help of Dominic. Something they didn’t know was Bryn had a history of sleep walking. They discovered she was still alive but lots of her bones were broken and that why the called in a chopper to pick her up and they called Tilt to replace Bryn. This is the end of book one but there is still book 2 and 3 where they pick up off where book one ended.

Christian perspective
This book is not written with a Christian perspective. But Christ like behaviours reflected, Dominic would think of others first and he was the only character that wasn’t judgemental and he never gave up. One thing that really amazed me was that one of the characters mentioned there is no such thing as luck only God’s will and that is something I would agree with. Some of the characters would say “thank God”. I think the book hints some religious characters. A way
this book can be more Christian, if it would mention them praying to God for strength and help during the boot camp and that they would stay physically fit, then it would have given a deeper reflection on faith. Overall Dominic shows his Christian like behaviour because he does not lose hope. Throughout the book there were many moments where he got frustrated but he controlled himself, like how a Christian should. If I would climb Everest I would be really scared and I
would ask God for help.


My Thoughts
I chose this book because the title sounded cool and the book was written by my favourite author, Gordon Korman. The book turned to be one of my favourites; in my opinion it’s the best
dventurous book out there. This book has an extensive amount of details and describes the characters thoughts really well. I personally not very fond of these type of adventurous books, but this one was really fun that I might read the whole trilogy. Reasons I like this book is because it has a really good story to teach which is having perseverance. There were lots of new words in
this book that I found helpful to add on to my vocabulary words list. I recommend this book for the type of people interested in adventure and survival books, this book stresses on the idea of having hope and not giving up.