Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel is a 224 page book published by Viking, and has been longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024.
Genre:
Literary Fiction
Synopsis:
An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors’ pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.
Frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Headshot is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivates young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.
My Thoughts:
You know how your very favorite books are not necessarily the same as what you would call the best books you’ve ever read? You can really appreciate the writing and what an author has done with their work, but then there are those books that just make you feel All the Things and just the experience of reading them brings you joy?
I would say HEADSHOT is well written literary fiction that’s really special in what it says about its characters—each individual girl’s life, motivations, hang-ups, and sheer physicality—and yet it didn’t really do much for me personally.
There are several powerful lines for quoting. For instance:
The desire to please people is the desire to not be singular.
In this way, decades into the future, boxing will be for Andi Taylor a kind of failed identity marker—something she tried on and wore around but that she later realized wasn’t her, or didn’t fit with the rest of her life, or her as a boxer didn’t fit the way the world needed her to be in order for her to survive.
It is this ability of Kate Heffer’s to rewrite the reality of her own desires that will allow her to turn every narrative of her life into a self-fulfilling truth. She is, in this way, able to perceive and remember only those events that fit with her current perception of the world around her.
There are people who, just by looking at disasters, implicate themselves in the violence at hand. These people, the self-implicating people, are far less likely to be victors, but they are more emotionally intelligent, and more likely to be able to see details that others might miss.
But I just wasn’t that into the story, such as it is. I got less and less interested in it as I read on. It gives play by plays of each match in the Daughters of America boxing tournament, and detours into making statements about each girl and her life—but the story ends when the two day long tournament does, and so there is no real call to become invested in any of the characters. And then it just kind of ends with a whimper.
Oh well, not for me, but I still appreciated some things about it, like the structure and insights into the characters and basically life as a human in general.
Jessica Crawford 