Take the lead Hanging on, letting go, and conquering life's hardest climbs

This well-written memoir combines professional rock climber DiGiulian's life story with fascinating information about an increasingly popular sport. DiGiulian is a pint-size prodigy who started scaling walls in 1999 at a climbing gym when she was just shy of seven years old. Over the next 17 years, she signs with sponsors like Adidas and Red Bull, battles body-image issues, graduates from Columbia University, falls in and out of love, loses her father, gets bullied on social media, undergoes major surgery, and accomplishes numerous first female ascents. She admits to missteps, explains how she uses a female urination device called a Shewee, and offers excellent descriptions, including how falling feels like "being abruptly dropped from the highest roller coaster." Rock climbing is team sport, with partners and photographers who capture the adventures on film for sponsors, Instagram posts, documentaries, and billboards. During graduation week, she and her family walk to the Adidas flagship store in Soho, where a two-story ad depicts her and the words, "Sasha DiGiulian . . . rock star, globetrotter, full-time student." In the end, she appreciates her body, her climbing community, her filmmaker boyfriend, and her ability to "take the lead" in her own life. Readers will cheer.

DiGiulian debuts with a gripping memoir about how she became a professional rock climber. She discovered her love for the sport at age seven while attending her older brother's birthday party at a climbing gym in her hometown of Alexandria, Va., where later that year she started training with a team to climb competitively. Her teenage years were spent practicing on weekdays and competing on weekends, hard work that paid off when at age 19 DiGiulian won gold in the Female Overall category at the 2011 International Federation of Sport Climbing World Championships. She continued to compete while studying at Columbia University, and though the death of her father from a stroke when she was 22 hit her hard, she worked through her grief by recommitting herself to climbing. The recreations of what it's like to cling to cliffsides will have readers' palms sweating ("The coarse sandpaper rock has shaved my fingertips bloody.... I maneuver my hips ever so slightly to the left in order to position my center of gravity above my left toe, which is balanced on a pebble-sized protrusion"), and her reflections on the sport are uplifting: "The challenge in life is to understand the difference between rational and irrational fear--to harness one and conquer the other." This thrills and inspires. (Sept.)