Gold

Gold
By Chris Cleave (321 pages)
Published by Simon & Schuster
Bookish rating: 4

As someone who enjoyed watching the 2014 Winter Olympics, despite them being "Putin's Olympics," and as someone who was a tad bummed they were over, I happily picked up Cleave's Gold at the library, anxious for the high drama that the pursuit of, well, gold engenders.

Two sprint bicyclists, Zoe and Kate, are BFFs and absolute rivals. Kate's daughter, Sophie, is battling leukemia. Cleave explores the single-mindedness that going to the Olympics entails and ups the drama and conflict big time by inserting something almost impossible to back-burner, even temporarily: a very sick child.

Cleave successfully sets up high stakes and neurotic, haunted characters, and that's good, because I'm a mere mortal with a completely normal resting heart rate---without characters with depth and flaws, I don't think I could buy into people so unbelievably self-absorbed, even if they ARE elite athletes.

Gold makes you ponder what it means to WIN, what WINNING gets you, and what has to be sacrificed for something so ultimately ambiguous. It's a theme I struggle with a bit as I watch the Olympics every couple of years. I love the pageantry of the Olympics, the stories and drama, the competition, and seeing the very best athletes in the world perform. But there is always something so random about it, too. So many factors at play.

Anyway, the dialogue dragged here and there, and the jumps in time could be, well, jumpy, but this is a (necessarily) fast-paced, original novel. Recommended.