By Dan Gemeinhart
Mark is twelve and his cancer has come back. He takes his dog, runs away toward Mount Rainier, and does not plan to come home.
Mark is twelve and his cancer has come back. Instead of starting treatment again he packs a bag, takes his dog Beau, and gets on a bus headed for Mount Rainier, the mountain he and his grandfather always meant to climb together. He isn't planning to come home, and the book tells you that early instead of hiding it. The climb goes badly. A group of teenagers robs and beats him, strangers help him without knowing what they're helping with, Beau nearly dies falling into a crevasse, and Mark comes close to freezing to death in a storm near the top. Every other chapter belongs to Jessie, his best friend back home and the only person who knows where he's gone. She has to decide whether keeping his secret makes her a good friend or something much worse. In the end Mark is found and carried down. He wakes in a hospital days later, having decided he wants the help he ran from.
It's a gripping survival story. The mountain is real, the danger is real, the pace barely lets up, and Beau is one of the great fictional dogs. What lifts it above the adventure is Jessie's half. She's keeping a secret that's costing her a lot, and the book takes seriously that covering for a sick friend can be the wrong thing to do. Some older children are tired of being handled, and for them the appeal is that this book refuses to go soft: it allows that being sick can make you furious and want to run, and it doesn't scold Mark for feeling that way. It also brings him back without a speech, letting him decide on his own that he wants his people again rather than being talked out of anything.