Recently I’ve noticed more books about competitive skiers in general fiction. This is a rarified sport, for those fit and wealthy enough to travel to fresh snow and expensive lodgings. Claudine Potts and her daughter, Wylie Potts, used to experience a rare BLUEBIRD DAY on the slopes, a perfect day for skiing. But they both, having excelled, dropped out of the sport. And, we learn, from each other’s lives.   Claudine, having wrecked her knees, continues to stress them, as she leads CycleTron enthusiasts who pedal at home, trying to keep up with the determined woman trainer. Sport can happen online these days. One anonymous follower is Wylie, who is using the training to gain fitness as she and her boyfriend plan to take on a disturbing-sounding pair fitness challenge in Paris. When fate intervenes, Wylie breaks a two-year silence to ask her mom to compete on her team. They meet on a train to Zermatt, a Swiss village under the Matterhorn with ski trails to France and Italy.   The visit is only supposed to last a couple of days, en route, but an avalanche traps thousands of tourists and skiers in the scenic location. Helicopter rides are for those with priority health issues. Not those with non-transferable travel tickets. The mother and daughter suddenly have time to talk, to meet other people, to look around and breathe the clean, Alpine air. But they want to get to Paris!   I love the descriptions of Zermatt, the tourists resigned to entertaining themselves and the avalanche precautions. While there’s no ski race, we get a lot of flashbacks, memories and conversations about Claudine and Wylie’s years in the sport. Anyone who’s trained hard for the fiercely competitive sport will understand what was driving them – but some trainers are worse than others. The generational cycle continued from bullied mom to nervous daughter. Claudine has a secret. She tries to contain it, but these days, social media bubbles up with speculation. I don’t like to think what social media would have been remarking about every athlete from a few decades ago, and the posters always seem to go harder on women.      Megan Tady has excellently reminded us, through her characters, that alpine ski contests burn huge amounts of fuel, and sometimes artificial snow has to be made, with shrinking glaciers and exposed mountainsides. On a BLUEBIRD DAY, we should look at who and what we love in our lives, and try to protect the natural environment that makes it possible.