Fall 2016 (Kernpunkt Press)
Tara Oritz is a wife, mother, and finance executive for a major corporation. Yet she strives for more. Bringing together an international team of world-renowned climbers, Tara leads a historic expedition up the jagged cliffs of Mount Fugue. At more than 26,000 feet, disaster strikes.
In the aftermath, writer and mountaineer JI Daniels pieces together the events of the expedition by exploring the personal struggles, interpersonal conflicts and physical hardships surrounding Tara as the expedition leader who comes to be the center of a media controversy. Mount Fugue twists through the shifting media landscape of live feeds and cable news networks, the result being a mediation on ethnicity, nationality, motherhood, leadership, and hope.
“This has all the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass incident, all the jargon and wonder of a Jon Krakauer story, and it’ll activate your narrative jigsaw compulsions as well—you can’t help trying to piece together the puzzle, can’t help wondering not just why and how and in what sequence, but who is even telling you all this?”
“JI Daniels is a mountaineer. Wonderfully, paradoxically, the mountain he summits is of his own creation—sheer, imposing, daunting. It says a great deal about his ambitions, intellect, and generous nature that he is up to the task of leading the reader into these constructed heights. Mount Fugue is the best kind of novel — like a view from a high peak, it reveals the world you thought you knew from entirely different vantage. The world expands with startling clarity. And you realize that what you see in this clear light is yourself, but from a wonderfully unfamiliar perspective.”
“To view and read J.I. Daniels’ Mount Fugue is to relinquish all expectations and begin—and begin again—to choose your own news story about Tara Ortiz, to choose your own answers to your own chosen questions about what business it ever was of hers—that wife, thatmother, that Latina and African American corporate executive—to attempt to conquer anything, to attempt to conquer anything at all let alone the deadliest mountain in the world.”