Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel: book review
Overview: The epitome of teenage girl boxing takes place in Reno Nevada where the eight girls who qualified from their regional tournaments converge to see who the best young boxer is. Each girl comes from a different background with different motivations for winning. Taking place within the seven matches of the boxing tournament, Bullwinkel examines these girl boxers and the people around them. Overall: 3
Characters: 3 I unfortunately really struggled to find the depth here in the characterization. The sketches of these characters are compelling and interesting. The ideas are there, just in a woefully undeveloped form. Each girl gets a handful of details about themselves that are then repeated over and over without gaining new layers or development. We're just told the same few facts over and over again. It frustrated me how shallow the characterization insisted on being because there was plenty of room to dig, so much real estate left on the page.
There's Artemis who comes from a legacy family of girl-boxers with both her sisters having competed in this competition before her. She's practiced and exacting and from a family that really supports her boxing, which is a rarity. What's missing from her narrative is the impact being at the end of the legacy has on her. How does she respond to the pressure? Is it all truly a point of pride, or does she feel burdened by expectations from those around her?
Andi payed her own entry fee with the money she made lifeguarding this summer, but she feels like this is blood money because a young boy drowned in the pool on her watch. She's haunted by the image of this boy as she pulled him out of the pool and the connection to her discovering her father's dead body in his home. Andi doesn't have external support. It gives her a sense of the weight of what she has to lose. But, unfortunately, the impact on her psyche is under-explored. While repeated images could be a way to echo her trauma, it got grating that Andi's recollection of the boy never developed past the "red trunks" and "corn dog legs." The lack of probing here grated on me most, especially in the context of the other fighters.
Rachel is the youngest of six kids, the only girl. She's scrappy and often forgotten, so she tries to be extreme and outrageous in the way she dresses and engages with the world. Rachel seems to see herself as being as alone as Andi, but Rachel is brought to the competition by her grandmother, quietly supportive.
Kate is an outlier among the competitors in the sense that she comes from a family with two supportive parents who drove her out there, who support her wishes even if they don't like it. Mostly, they seem to pity her for being what they make out to be as ugly, and they want to give her any kind of outlet where she might succeed because the conventional paths won't be open to her. This seems exaggerated and strangely expressed in the book. Kate feels privileged, especially compared to the other girls. And she's only into boxing because it was suggested she'd be good at it, and she just wants to be the best at something. Most of Kate's personality is overridden by her desire to count as a grounding mechanism. Numbers are most of her thoughts.
Iggy and Izzy are cousins. Iggy has a facial birthmark that has made her an outcast and flavored her view of the world. It's given her a fire. Izzy, like Artemis, has a respect for and farther reaching understanding of boxing as a sport. She's one of the few that aspires to go pro in the murky world beyond amateur fighting. The cousins are competitive, but they never put the fight over each other—even if Iggy is a less graceful loser than Izzy.
Tanya and Rose are the final pairing of the fight, and they felt the least developed. I can hardly recall Tanya's narrative, even just a few hours after finishing the book. Tanya has an interest in acting that comes from a similar root as her boxing passion, and the fact that she, late in life, becomes a very popular movie star grandma is her defining feature. Rose is fascinated by the fountains outside a downtown Dallas office building. She's also Catholic and was bullied in school so badly she had to be moved to public school from her Catholic elementary school. Rose has both a burning motivation and control.
Trying to write these character descriptions further compounds how thin these characters feel. It's only been a handful of hours since I finished reading, but the characters didn't stay with me at all. It feels like the development at the beginning of the book was much stronger than what was given later as those characters feel more firmly cemented in my head.
Plot: 3 You'd think the tension would be built in since the entire book takes place in the midst of boxing matches. Unfortunately, that's not true. The pacing is fast because the story is told in these tiny sections, but the amount of burdensome repetition and the lack of real visceral, embodied details from either fighter makes it hard to feel the pull of the match. Often, Bullwinkel is often too heavy handed with her, what I guess would be considered, foreshadowing, and it becomes clear who will win the match far before it's over, which didn't necessarily feel like her intention. There was a serious lack of focus and grounding that hampered the progression here, even though the idea of the book is fascinating.
Writing: 3 The concept is genius. Compelling, tight, tension-packed. High stakes but also contained. Unfortunately, there's not enough constraint applied here for the form to work. The voice of the narrator really hampered the entire project for me. It's told in third person omniscient with all the head-hopping pitfalls that writers get warned off of attempting the style because of. It's jarring, where the characters are hard enough to grasp to begin with.
Also, we didn't need into everyone's heads from the judges to the random reporter in the corner. The scope issue also extended into the narrator's awareness of time. The book is told in present tense, but then the narrator will throw in random bits about who these teens become as older women, the jobs and kids they have, where they live, who they stay close to. This felt deeply unnecessary, and even the forward looking glimpses felt flat. The narrator really has no discernible voice, which makes the book feel bland. Repetition is so common that it doesn't feel intentional or stylistic. Also, the characters are referred to by both just their first name and their first and last names. Hearing a character referred to by their full name seven times in a single paragraph was enough to put my brain on frustrated edge.
I was so excited for this novel and was particularly curious to read the book considering that boxing is one of those unique amateur sports that people really fall out of the older they get and that doesn't offer a super robust future. That creates a lot of room for intrigue that's not explored with much depth. Also, one of the characters in Blue Sisters was a boxer, and I became fascinated with the world through her. This book didn't come anywhere close in bringing to life what it was to be a boxer, even though that was the entire focus of the book. Perhaps seeing it done so richly in a third of the space in Blue Sisters made this fall extra flat for me, but I'm genuinely a bit confused at how this one ended up on so many prize lists, including the Booker, this year.
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