'Twenty Miles' - Cara Hedley

'I inherited a lot of his stuff. People die and their hockey equipment lives on. Sig joked that she'd cross dressed me as a kid, decking me out in his old clothes all worn at the knees and elbows, but why the hell not, the clothes were in the attic, ripe for the picking. But that wasn't it - I knew Sig found some sort of satisfaction in the reincarnation of the clothes, seeing them walk again, seeing them run and climb trees.

So I got the clothes and the equipment and the following parts as well: his eyes, his laugh, his cowlick and his hockey hands, among others. Apparently this is the most unbelievable part, these hands of mine: I handle the puck the same way, have the same moves, have his hands. As though I'd grown from these hands somehow. Hands growing arms like branches, skin, crawling into bloom, growing a heart, eyes, a mouth. But first, the hands. The rest: an afterthought, a revision.'

Iz’s dad Kristjan was a promising ice hockey player who died at nineteen, seven months before she was born. Among other things Iz has inherited his hockey hands, his touch with the puck. It’s a gift she’s always made use of, playing on boys pee wee hockey teams, Having a father who loved hockey but died young, inheriting his hockey skills, it all comes with a lot of baggage that Iz isn’t equipped to sort through:

'...a hockey player dies young in a small town and his death grants him a different sort of fame. Even people who had never spoken a word to Kristjan seemed to feel they knew him intimately. To know him was to know the grief that covered the town like a rough, wool blanket. They felt compelled to tell me about him, as though I were some walking, talking memorial wearing a sandwich board that said, Please deposit testimony here.' .

So Iz just plays hockey the way everyone seems to think she should want to, although she’s never really examined why she plays.

Scouted by the coach of the Winnipeg University who have a female team in the newly emerging female ice hockey college program league Iz finds herself trying out for The Scarlets, almost by default. The Scarlets are rowdy, prank pulling, loud mouthed, awesome girls. In the beginning they appear very traditionally masculine and I worried that they’d end up condemning femininity, but the reality of the team’s behaviour is much more complex than that and the reader is left with a picture of a team who are busy creating their own definitions of what a woman can be. If femininity means ‘acting like a woman’ then all the teams various actions fall within the definition of femininity, because they are women. When Toad swears, chugs and talk about sex all the time she’s not rejecting women. She loves all her female team mates, whatever they’re like, even if she might tease a friend for taking a job at Hooters, or call her friend Barbie. She’s creating herself as a woman who is a person without limits. Boz who sounds very comforting and traditionally feminine, joins in naturally with all the rowdy, traditionally male behaviour the team take part in.

The Scarlets provide exactly what I was looking for from a fictional female sports team - humanity. The team members are complex and their relationships with each other are complicated. They’re healthily competitive, although unable to tolerate mistakes on the ice and while supportive of each other’s lives, not above mocking each other mercilessly and then making mistakes in the way they relate to each other. In my review of 'Whip It’ I said I wanted more about the particular problems of girls forming a team, especially with all the anti-girl history that flies through the sports world. The team dynamics in ‘Twenty Miles’ relate more to how hard it is for any group of people to bond together, which I loved. Although girls have our own specific issues related to gender (as do men) we’re people and any people becoming a team, or a group of friends that will work well together encounter messy situations. It’s a job that’s constantly in progress, regardless of the gender of the group.

There was an early moment of conflict between Iz and the team captain Hal, where Hal says ' 'I was just laid out by a fucking Barbie doll.' ' and I thought Hedley was going to create and resolve a typical traditionally feminine vs anti-feminine rivalry, which would have been interesting. Instead she went in a different direction, showing that both Hal and Iz differ from the strong gender positions that comment seems to set up and moving them towards a team mate relationship, without mixing in gendered rivalries. At the same time Iz gestures to her particular confusion on joining a female team, as she’s been brought up in a world of male teammates. I liked the interplay between Iz’s confusion as a girl unused to this kind of close female community and her confusion as a person unused to close friendships with people her own age.

The rowdy team intimacies baffle Iz and she struggles to feel at ease, despite the girls slow bonding with her. Maybe I privilege stories where characters have to work hard at making connection and working out how the world works, over books where everyone’s friendship are so easy because my own experience makes them feel more realistic (in fact I’m pretty sure I do) but I’m willing to stand up and say Hedley has imparted a particular kind of beauty into her story by shaping the narrative around so many complicated relationships. She really evokes the misconnections that disrupt our relationships, but shows that just because we think we’re failing, or that we’re not making that friendship work as well as it could because we just don’t understand each other completely, that we’re still building something lasting and meaningful. There are two events that really flicked this switch for me – the teams fears about throwing two girls on the team a party to celebrate them getting together, but their genuine wish to celebrate with them because they’re part of the team and the way Iz’s teammates reach out to her and keep reaching out with answer phone messages when she leaves the university for a while.

Back in her Iz’s old life Sig, Iz’s grandmother, who raised her with the help of her husband Buck (who is now deceased) is trying to find a way to live in an empty house. Her husband and son are dead, Iz is gone and Sig finds herself almost wilfully dropping out of her life’s structure, indulging rebellious, unhealthy habits to kill the time: smoking inside, reaching for a drink before twelve and falling asleep because 'she thought angrily as she let herself drift away - up toward the ceiling spangled with brand-new cars and Iz and all the negative space surrounding a slab of lonely liver - this is what old people do.' . It is rare that I enjoy two people’s storylines equally, but Sig’s storyline is lovely. Hedley uses more obvious symbolic devices to suggest empowerment in Sig’s journey, than she uses in the sections of Iz’s storyline, which could have tipped her story into sappiness, but instead I thought the resolutions to her story were fragile and touchingly fortuitous.

It’s hard to describe ‘Twenty Miles’ in a concrete way because its style is halfway to abstract. Deliberate sentences like 'Small, empty porches. Silver tusked hooks everywhere and clear Tupperware bins under the benches. All the stall walls were bare except for one with a poster of David Hsselhoff in a green Speedo and a Santa hat.' are full of austere and odd images. The constant use of such detail, coupled with the blunt, unflinching way in which Iz pulls every detail out into the harsh spotlight, creates a sombre, but truthful background tone.

Hedley fills the lives of her main characters Iz and Sig with a mood of isolation and disconnection in. At the same time she moderates the bleak, uncomfortable mood by increasing the pace and precision of the prose in places, for example:

'Breath moving in smooth currents, in and out of my lungs, puck clinging tight to the stick, and bodies everywhere, colours everywhere. But now I saw only the spaces between, precise. Incisions in the frozen air. The smooth slice of blades,alignment of joints and muscles, angles measured and tight. Mathematical.'

and including flashbacks that take readers away from the immediate feel of misunderstanding to periods of time that seem to offer answers. She also breaks up Iz's sober reflections with the team's friendly but dirty, familiar banter and relationships. There’s also something about the placement of her individual sentences which creates a rhythm of shortish pushes and longer sucking pulls of opposing forces, but it’s not a regular rhythmic pattern so I’m not quite sure how to explain it. I could also feel a delicious allowance of space between the sentences when I read. They each contribute to creating single linear narrative, but each sentence also seems to matters on its own, but not because each sentence has a greater meaning to the story. There are throwaway, although well written, sentences in here like 'The smell of Windex and musty carpet spilled out as I opened the door.' but each sentence feels kind of self-contained, maybe like the full stop is in exactly the right place each time and this makes it feel as if each sentence does have greater importance in the novel than just the information and the meaning of the words it contains. Each sentence has its own exact, wonderful weight. That probably sounds so pretentious and I apologise. The result of whatever is going on is that somehow the writing develops its own deliberate rhythm which encourages readers to stay with the writing rather than rushing ahead with the plot.

The novel’s content can also be somewhat abstract. Often Hedley denies her readers connections between statements and meaning. The information given to the reader contains gaps that are never resolved, for example it’s never clear (or even really hinted at) how Kristjan died, or what killed Sig’s husband Buck. If that sounds like a failing to you then hopefully you’ll let me explain why it felt like a strength to me. Have you ever read a piece of literary fiction that has an abstract, disconnected style and seems to claim that it’s going to leave you with complete blanks for you to fill at the end, but it only really leaves you with a neat set of say two plausible set interpretations (I’ll acknowledge that there are many books where a variety of concrete interpretations are wanted to provoke confusion and yet also clarify some strong emotion like horror (I’m thinking of ‘Liar’), but there are some books where they are not)? I can get kind of bristly about those kind of books, because I hate when a novel promises something it has no real intention of delivering and thinks you’ll be dumb enough not to notice. ‘Twenty Miles’ is not like that. Hedley sets out saying ‘look mystery, the unknowableness of humanity’ and by the end there are genuinely things you won’t know, things you can’t quite puzzle out from the text or infer from clues, things you will never know for sure, EVER! I found it really invigorating, that an author could trust her readers so much that she felt comfortable leaving them to construct parts of her world. In my mind I formed a picture of Kristjan’s death from a small, unrelated comment, for small reason that would never stand up to critical scrutiny and I appreciated that freedom, that trust, that casting of a work out into the universe without endless clarification.

‘Twenty Miles’ is a book that I think requires a lot of patience (for example I found myself not really absorbing it properly, so went back and started from the beginning again after fifty pages – it worked for me and I loved it.) The lack of clarification can sometimes play against the novel and become frustrating, rather than teasing, freeing, for example it took me forever to work out who was speaking in one encounter. For me, these moments were few (on the second attempt) but like I said this book needs patience and possibly quiet reading time, at least in the beginning before you become properly acquainted with the characters. I appreciate that I might sound like I’m defending a failure of craft (missing information) because of a personal preference and it’s quite possible that I am (and if I was smarter I’d be all over debating whether we can call much an absolute in the craft of writing any more, but I’m not so I will wait for the universe to provide such a discussion from people who know what they’re talking about) but the way that ‘Twenty Miles’ is written connected with me in a specific ‘me’ way and all I can really do is tell you is how I felt about that and alert you to the fact that how I felt might mean I’m generously interpreting something others will call a flaw.

There’s a lot of tentative, developing truth to be found in the words around the gaps. Iz’s voice is frank, but unsure and wobbly, as she tries to work out what other people’s actions indicate. She’s not your typical over analytical narrator, more like a DJ type character who is trying to describe the world to herself with insufficient information, work out what’s happening on the fly and find a place that she can fit without pretending. Or maybe, she’s a split between an overly analytical narrator and DJ, the kind of character who makes insightful observations, but can’t quite connect them to any ultimate meaning for a long time. Sig is the same way and as you’d expect when a teenager has lived with a someone their whole life their voices have some of the same no nonsense tone, the same way of approaching life kindly, but firmly. Sig’s voice is distinguished by an instinctive curmudgeonly confidence in her relations with others that Iz hasn’t yet integrated in to her inner personality, although she is sometimes called on to pretend it.

If I have one issue with ‘Twenty Miles it’s a small, but constant dismissal of female ice dancers by the team that did seem like a gendered dismissal. It’s never resolved and I’m not sure what to make of it. Does The Scarlett’s acceptance of all kinds of women contain an exclusionary element? Does it rely on women proving themselves in traditionally masculine contests? Is it definitely a gendered dismissal? If you read iiiitttt we could talk about iiiittttt and many other things I haven’t been able to fit in here (Ed, Kristjan’s team mate for instance, who I fell in love with a little just because of the quality of the Hedley’s descriptions of him. On that note I am offering to send my own copy of the book on to anyone who wants it (more than one person and I’ll use a random number selector to pick a recipient).

Other Reviews

The Happy Nappy Bookseller
95 Books
Chasing Ray

'Whip It' - Shauna Cross

Writing about ‘Whip It’(formerly ‘Derby Girl’) by Shauna Cross requires me to be two people, with two different sets of reactions. My critical brain and my personal reading brain don’t agree about this book at all and they are both shouting at me to tell their side of the story and only their side of the story. My critical brain says the parts of the book’s plot that revolved around friendship and romance were unoriginal, that it has issues with the resolution of the relationship between Bliss Cavendar and her mother and that the book could be kind of shallow in places, when it had a great opportunity for depth. My personal, readerly brain wants to shout about how much fun it is to ride with Bliss. It wants everyone to know that I read the book in two days because Bliss’s first person voice is hilariously scathing and captures the determined teenage passion of a girl caged by her parents. Please excuse the squabbling, while they each try to get their side represented and I try to stop one side from silencing the other with a brick.

Bliss Cavendar is stuck in the wrong life. She’s a punk rock rebel with blue hair, living small town Bodeen, most famous for its icecream. Her beauty pageant obsessed mother is determined Bliss will be crowned Miss Bluebonnet this year. Bliss works at the Oink Joint with her Arab-American best friend Pash, while they both dream about getting out of Bodeen forever.

On a trip to the big city (Austin) for clothes (mother approved clothes, or nothing) Bliss grabs a poster for a derby girl bout. After one match she’s obsessed and after a rocky, but fast try out she begins her illicit life as a shoving, jumping, costumed derby girl with the Hurl Scouts.

First let me address the fact that I had a definite set of expectations about what a roller derby novel would be concerned with. These expectations collided with the reality of ‘Whip It’ and probably caused me to feel like the book was not performing as well as it could have done, which is not entirely fair to the book that ‘Whip It’ actually was. At the most basic level I expected that a novel about roller derby would explain the main rules of the sport to the reader. I learnt plenty about the costuming of roller derby and I learnt what some of the more dangerous, advanced moves were called, like jumping the rail. However, I learnt very little about the rules of the sport and I still can’t picture you what the move the novel is named after (taking a whip off someone’s leg) might look like.

I also expected ‘Whip It’ to examine the idea of women in sport in depth. Roller derby seems to be a sport women have claimed as their own and male participants are in the minority. A female sports team seems the ideal conceit to structure an examination of how team dynamics are established among women (who are often taught that other women are the enemy) and how more isolationist forms of feminism, or ideas about female friendship and competitiveness play into the creation of a female team. Instead of creating a more complicated model of female acceptance, Cross has Bliss’s teammates accept her almost immediately, based on a mixture of her skating skills and what seems to be a natural inclination towards sisterhood. Having seen quite a few sporting films (with male and female characters) where being a good player doesn’t necessarily guarantee acceptance and knowing that being a girl (or for that matter, being a man) doesn’t always guarantee you automatic acceptance into a gendered group Bliss’s teammates attitudes seemed somewhat oddly realised to me. I’m not saying it’s an unrealistic situation, some groups of friends will quickly accept a newbie because they seem cool, some sports teams base their personal acceptance of a new player on their skill, but I would have liked some clarification about why the author felt Bliss would be accepted so quickly by a derby team. I suspect, knowing that the author is a former roller derby player herself, that she has inserted her own experience, without explaining the reasoning behind the other girls acceptance of a new player and that left me feeling like the book lacked a bit of internal explanation.

The fun of the sport seems to come not only from the competitive element, but from the aspect of violence roller derby includes rather playfully. The subversive derby costumes (another fun element of the novel) straddle an interesting line between being feminine, but also non-traditionally feminine. All this seems to provide any author with the opportunity to write a book that digs deep into a reconstructed idea of femininity. I thought that Bliss’s separate storyline, about having a mother who is determined that her punk rock daughter will become a beauty pageant winner, provided a chance for readers to think about traditional femininity’s opposition to divergent expressions of femininity, although that storyline doesn’t really examine the similarities between costuming as a derby girl and costuming as a pageant queen, just the surface differences between the two kinds of costume. Bliss’s first person voice gestures towards some ideas about femininity and how it can be co-opted into a subversion of itself (my doesn’t that sound pompous) like 'For instance there are girls who are so fierce that wearing pink makes them look that much cooler (especially when paired with black-and-white-striped tights or a skull choker). On those badass vixens, pink becomes an in-your-face dare...' but the storyline doesn’t really develop those ideas further. That’s ok, not every book needs to go deep into issues, it’s just that I was expecting a connected and coherent investigation running through the book that would really rip into these ideas.

I think the disappointment of some of my expectations relate to the quality of the book. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think a roller derby book should teach readers more about the sport. Overall I have been a little disappointed this month with how authors writing sporting books seem to avoid an attempt at naturally integrating explanations of rules and moves into their novels, so perhaps I should have mentioned this lack in other reviews. The other two expectations...well I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a roller derby novel to look at those ideas, but the fact that ‘Whip It’ decides to skim the surface of these ideas rather than deeply engaging with them doesn’t make ‘Whip It’ a flawed book, merely a different kind of book. So now let me turn to examining ‘Whip It’ on the kind of book it actually strives to be and whether it succeeds.

I think ‘Whip It’ is a book focused on increasing female empowerment, at least that’s my theory on why Bliss is taken so quickly to the heart of the team. Shauna Cross wants to show the female bonding aspect of roller derby, without real complication to provide a positive example of roller derby sisterhood. Considering the way Cross shows Bliss desert the sisterhood later, by failing her best friend Pash because Bliss is too busy with her new boyfriend I don’t think this entirely positive representation compromises the reality of the novel. Reality aside, do we not all like to read a novel where girls get to be friends without reservations and productive teammates? Does it not make us say ‘Hurray!’? I could talk a little bit about how I think Cross’s message of female empowerment is slightly limited, but this is already long and I do still think that girls will take away a big chunk of empowerment from ‘Whip It’.

Putting expectations aside ‘Whip It’ is a lot of fun. It’s a book that relies entirely on the fun, quirky, snarky voice of Bliss to interest the reader. If you don’t like Bliss’s way of expressing herself you won’t get on with this book at all, but if you do you’ll probably read it as fast and delightedly as I did (fyi I think those of you who didn’t enjoy Empress of the World might have problems with Bliss’ voice, she reminds me a lot of Katrina). I find it so difficult to describe this concept of a successful first person voice, I guess because perceiving a voice as successful voice rests so much on each reader’s individual ideas about authenticity, as well as their likes and dislikes. For me Bliss is the kind of teenage rebel I recognise from books I read when I was a teenager, she’s a brave, cool/nerd girl with internally created integrity, who still makes the romantic mistakes of a teenager who has never known popularity. It’s probably best if I give you a sample of her voice so you can decide for yourself whether you’d like her:

'On the cool-scale, there girls are a ten. On a good day I'm a two-point-seven. I feel like the sad mathlete awkwardly trying to infiltrate the cheerleader clique at lunch in every teen movie you wish you'd never seen (except you have, several times). And we all know these scenarios do not end well. Especially for the mathlete.' .

At times I felt like Bliss and Pash could be a little meaner than they needed to be to prove to themselves that they were worth more than the rest of their school:

'So, please Lisa, for the sake of all humanity, kindly shove your ass and your Band-aid-size panties back into your too-tight jeans, and we won't be forced to vomit on you....

And when, by fifth period, Lisa takes to wearing her rhinestone hoodie around her waist for extra butt coverage, victory is mine. I can now proceed to my locker in peace.' .

But as I mentioned last week if I was a teenage reader on the outside of school culture I’d probably respond differently. I remember taking the rebel character of my generations young adult books to my heart and urging them on at the expense of all the mean girls, extenuating circumstance be damned.

There were a few parts I wasn’t keen on that I’ll just breeze through. The romantic storyline is incredibly unoriginal and becomes almost moralistic. For me, the use of an 80s Christian rock shirt as a subtle symbol for giving up your virginity is what saved Cross’s message about not giving something away that you can’t get back from becoming a heavy handed tale of ‘woe my virginity it is lost to a liar’ and made it kind of hilarious:

'But if you insist on blithely ignoring the above wisdom, DO NOT GIVE HIM YOUR BELOVED STRYPER SHIRT. You will never see it again. Trust me. I had to learn the hard way. (And, hell, yes, it still hurts, but it does get better.)'

I also couldn’t quite believe that Bliss and her mother bonded so quickly because Bliss’s heart was broken. There were a lot of deep issues between them and their reconciliation seemed too easy. I don’t want to discount these weak plot elements, but I do personally prize voice, so while these things bugged me I read this book in a two day blur of slightly giddy enjoyment because of Bliss’s voice.

If your expectations for this book sound similar to mine then you might need to readjust them to enjoy ‘Whip It’ (or ‘Whip It’ might just not be the book for you). Later this week I’ll be reviewing ‘Twenty Miles’ and while that’s about a female ice hockey team, it satisfied a lot of what I wanted and expected from ‘Whip It’. Otherwise ‘Whip It’ has a lot of fast fun to offer.

Excepto-girls (Or 'Great She's Making Up Words Now')

In my review of ‘Girl Overboard’ I mentioned that I thought Syrah, although very cool, was written as a bit of an Excepto-girl heroine (could not think of a better term, please suggest, as I keep thinking of Octo-girl whenever I use this term), but I didn’t really explain what I meant. Let me try to do so now (with some invaluably clarifying help from Jeanne at Necromancy Never Pays and her husband Ron).

What makes an Excepto-girl heroine and why do I find them such negative versions of non-traditional womanhood? There are a couple of criteria that all Excepto-girl characters fit:

An Excepto-girl character is usually the only female character in a book, who is engaged in a particular activity, for example a sport. Usually this activity is something traditionally identified as a male activity (like sport) or an activity that doesn’t fit with traditional ideas about femininity (like, oh, let’s say making dark, angry graffiti art).

Even if she’s not the only female character who is involved in this activity (for this post’s purpose let’s say the activity is a sport that is traditionally viewed as male) she’s described as the only female character who is serious about the sport, the only female character taking part in the sport without a secondary agenda.

However you can’t just use those criteria to identify an Excepto-girl. Following that logic every character who defied gender stereotypes in sports, or who took a sport more seriously than other would fall into the Excepto-girl bracket. A female character can of course be the only girl playing a sport, or taking an activity seriously without falling into the Excepto-girl category, but an Excepto-girl character will have one of the above two criteria coded into her characterisation. To identify whether a female character who fits the above criteria is an Excepto-girl, or an exceptional female character it is necessary to look deeper and examine her relations with other women in her world.

Excepto-girls use their attachment to a non-traditional form of womanhood to elevate themselves above other girls. They point to their competence or dedication to an activity that is not traditionally female as a distinguishing factor between themselves and other female characters, as many sportswomen characters must do implicitly because they’re the only girls playing a particular sport. In many novels sortswomen are different from other girls in their world (although novels about teams of female athletes do exist) as other girls don’t play sport. In novels that feature Excepto-girls the only sportswoman character frames her difference from other girls as a superiority over these girls, an enhanced state of being that goes past the facts of superior physical ability and instead relates to a creating a version of the female gender that the Excepto-girl character judges better than other versions of femaleness. Basically the Excepto-girl heroine judges her anti-feminine behaviour better than other women’s feminine behaviour, rather than framing their non-traditionally female way of life as a positive, alternative form of girl lifestyle. She concentrates on framing the traditionally feminine as a negative state and ignoring other women’s right to claim they are leading a similar authentic non-traditionally female lifestyle because they don’t hit the same anti-feminine standards that she does. When their narrative is done it is impossible to go back and find any other female characters who match the Excepto-girl in the authentic nature of her dedication to her sport.

What I guess I’m trying to say is that when a female character rejects feminine standard for herself, or shouts down the way the prevalent call for a woman to be feminine excludes all other forms of womanhood she becomes exceptional and brave, for example a tomboy who doesn’t want to live a life in dresses when her soul is made of ripped t-shirts and studs, or a weightlifter who prizes physical fitness above received ideas on what a feminine body looks like. It’s when these exceptional female characters begin to use femininity as a slur, or distinguish themselves as almost a separate species from traditional women by condemning other women because of their femininity (‘she’s so girly’) that these characters become an Excepto-girl.

Firstly Excepto-girls describe other, traditionally female girls in derogatory ways, that specifically link these girls femininity to negative traits like a lack of competence, or dedication (‘she’d break a nail if she tried to catch a ball’). They often explain how femininity is negative by showing how it fails to conforms to masculine ideas of interest, coolness and strength (He can’t possibly find anything to talk about with a preening girly girl like her). Excepto-girl characters will typically talk about other female characters in a derogatory way that focuses on the other girls femininity (they’re so girly), or because the character feels that their interest in an activity is only part of a strategy to snare boys interest (they wouldn’t snowboard if he wasn’t into it). It’s the inverse of the rhetoric some traditionally feminine girls have been using to deride non-traditional feminine girls for decades (‘she’s so unfeminine’, ‘how does she expect to catch a man if she doesn’t do X’).

Crucially, I wouldn’t class a female character as an Excepto-girl just because she used sexist terms to describe why another female character is lesser than her. There has to be an interplay between one of the criteria I listed at the beginning and sexist derision. An Excepto-girl is both the only representation of the female gender ‘getting it right’ by playing sports, or taking sports seriously and determined to explain why she is the only girl ‘getting it right’ by using sexist language to deride other women, or sports women and clearly showing how separate she is from these malfunctioning women.

It’s probably easiest to explain what makes a female character in a sports novel an Excepto-girl heroine, by explaining why I think Syrah in ‘Girl Overboard’ qualifies as an Excepto-girl.

In ‘Girl Overboard’ Syrah is not the only girl who snowboards, lots of her female peers snowboard, but she is the only one who is described as taking it seriously as a sport. All the other girls in Syrah’s town who snowboard are described disparagingly by Syrah:

‘The Shiraz in me wants to demand, “So you mean, why I aren’t Miss Pretty in Hot Pink like the rest of you? Because I’m not trolling for boys when I ride.” ‘
or are set up by the author to appear as poser snowboarders, only interested in getting men to notice them.’

Now I get the need to hate when you’re a misunderstood, nonconformist teenage female character. All YA books need a good villain for the underdog teenage heroine to despise. In real life nonconformist teenagers are getting harassed by other teenagers and the underdogs need to see that aggravation recognised as a reality in books. The conflict between feminine girls and non-traditionally female heroines is still so existent (damn you dualist society) that it doesn’t surprise me that so many conflicts within YA are between the feminine, popular girl and the unfeminine misfit. So, when a character like Syrah, who doesn’t feel feminine, thinks derogatory, feminine bashing thoughts about some of the nastier girls at her school I get her attitude. Syrah isn’t a girly girl and the girls make fun of her because of that (among other things). She reacts by entrenching herself in that opposite position of non-girly girl and denounces what is most precious to her enemies (their constant, defensive presentation of feminine appearances).

When the author Justina Chen Headley backs Syrah up by making her enemies lack interest in serious snowboarding she’s showing Syrah’s justification for rejecting their specific brand of femininity as bad. These uber-feminine girls really are mean, lazy posers in comparison with Syrah, the authors writes them like that, so Syrah has a reason to use comments about the way these girls dress and act in a traditionally feminine way as derogatory descriptions because their femininity is connected to their negative traits – they let their femininity hamper their lives. I mean I don’t love that Headley gives Syrah this justification for her hatred, because it’s hatred with a decidedly girl specific edge (these are girly girls and that’s why these characters are worthless/ hateable/useless – girly girlness equates with stupidity and desperate flirting and preening and fakeness and EVIL) but then I am not a teenage girl reader, trying to find a way to hold my head up against the girls who torment me for not dressing in a feminine way. If I’d read this book when I was a teenager I’d have probably hissed unreservedly at all the mean girls.

And I think Justina Chen Headley goes some way towards correcting this feminine focused hatred (Syrah makes female friends and enjoys a gossip which sounds divinely girlicious and she has a small moment of sympathy for the leader of the mean girls). Headley also goes a long way to explaining that Syrah’s attitude towards women is partially taught (Syrah’s family is a pit of women hatred and the women in her family are also full of self-hatred, all of which they transfer to Syrah).

What cemented Syrah as an Excepto-girl is not that she uses her status as a non-traditional girl to elevate herself above the mean girls at school who just happen to snowboard idly; it’s that she uses it to elevate herself above every other woman involved in snowboarding. There is not a single other female snowboarder in this novel who takes the sport seriously enough to compete with Syrah, in fact there isn’t another female character that could be described as a serious athlete. The idea that no other girls in Syrah’s snowboarding town are serious snowboarders becomes a background assumption that the reader must make because Syrah never mentions any other serious female snowboarders. I’m not sure I want to dispute the reality of this, because I don’t know anything about how many female snowboards there might be per town, but I was surprised there wasn’t even one other serious snowboarding girl mentioned – even briefly, even if she lived one town over. It struck me there that the author was setting Syrah up as an Excepto-girl, a heroine who transcends all other women in her chosen field. It’s not only the specific mean girls that hate on Syrah, who are described as being non-serious snowboarders, it’s all other girls who are described as non-serious snowboarders by omission of the presence of any other snowboarding girls.

Let me briefly compare another sporting heroine to Syrah to try and make clear the difference between an Excepto-girl and a girl who is exceptional, but not the only positive representation of female character (traditional or non-traditional). DJ may be the only girl who plays football in ‘Dairy Queen’ and she’s the only girl we see train seriously, but there are brief references to her female friends who play sport and take it seriously. DJ remembers her best friend Amber crying when they lose an important basketball game.

With no other serious snowboarding girls mentioned in ‘Girl Overboard’ Syrah’s negative comments about the mean girls from her school and her description of the boy motivated interest Natalie, (Age’s girlfriend and a negative female character) suddenly develops in snowboarding, set the standard for other snowboarding girls in this book. Without any other sportswomen to offer perspective, Syrah’s words ring as a criticism of all other girls who try to snowboard. With the inclusion of a few other serious sporting women in ‘Dairy Queen’ Catherine Murdock stops the non-traditionally female DJ from standing as the sole positive model for how to be a serious sportswoman and avoids excluding all women who don’t act like DJ from achieving serious sportswoman status.

Later in the book Syrah goes to Whistler for a big snowboarding event. While there she doesn’t meet, or see any female snowboarders who might be serious about the sport. She does see girls who have come off the slopes early to hang around in the hotel lounge:

‘…this lobby that could double for a fashion runway of Gore-Tex, there are so many girls in here. With three good hours of riding left in the day they’re inside? What I would do to grab their gear and go.’

and screaming fan girls ‘jostling to get an even better position at the fence, hoping to attract the attention of both the snowboarders and the cameramen’.

These are the girls she chooses to mention. Syrah remains the exception to the girl rule, the odd one out surrounded by ‘pro hos’ lavishing adoration on the male snowboarders, the only girl serious about sport.

Finally there’s the disparaging way that Syrah refers to the vague mass of female snowboarders who have gone pro. She describes them as ‘boobs on boards’. Now let me just get this clear; Syrah doesn’t mean to imply that they’re talentless bimbos with this derogatory term (although ick, I really wished she wouldn’t use it), instead she’s talking about the double standard pro snowboarding enforces on female snowboarders. Female pros have to watch their weight, dress attractively, say the right things as well as having killer tricks. They have to be supermodels on boards, or no one will care how well they snowboard. Male snowboarders rock up and perform. She doesn’t see any pro female snowboarders who like her, are a little bigger and wear baggy jeans. However her repeated use of the term does seem to reduce other female snowboarders to girls who have caved into the pressure of having a feminine body image, whereas Syrah eventually comes to accept her larger size and other things that make her appearance less ideally feminine, like the scars from her accident. Her use of this term doesn’t really allow for the idea that sportswomen display a variety of appearances, although it initially seems to aim to do just that.

Later when Syrah decides she doesn’t want to go pro, she says it’s because she wants to ‘keep snowboarding pure’ and avoid conforming to the sexist demands sponsors will make because she’s a female snowboarder. Her reasoning denigrates other professional female snowboarders. By Syrah’s logic they conform to all the things the industry asks of them, which she now believes sully the sport’s purity, so to her it seems that the current crop of professional snowboarders didn’t keep snowboarding pure. Following her reasoning through it seems she is saying they weren’t serious enough about snowboarding to go against the sexist demands of pro sport and turn down a pro career. By forming this type of argument Syrah excludes pro female snowboarders from being able to make an authentic claim to a commitment, or a true, deep passion for snowboarding. There’s also a really sketchy comment that she makes about how she doesn’t ‘need to reel in an up-and-coming star and stand at his side while everyone congratulates him on his drool-worthy tricks.’ as if every ‘pro snowboard girl who’s featured on the covers of magazines and in countless ads’ employs this predatory form of dating to boost their profile. Maybe because Syrah makes female friends who aren’t sporty, but are capable her Excepto-girl status is cut down, but personally I’d say it’s split in half. In general life she learns and acknowledges other girls can be awesome, in the sporting arena she’s an Excepto-girl uses sexist descriptions and reasoning to place herself above every other female member who takes part in snowboarding.

My problem with Excepto-girls is not just that they seem unrealistic in the present day (sportswomen may have low public visibility and there may be lower numbers of them in many sport than male athletes, but they do exist in numbers great enough to create competitive categories around). They also seem to fortify a system of feminism that doesn’t fit comfortably with a third wave of feminism based on choice, which I think is in general helping to advance society’s ideas about what a girl can be. By placing Excepto-girl characters into sports fiction authors perpetuate the idea that a girl can be either/or, sporty or feminine, not both and that one state is better than the other, rather than different but just as valid. They ultimately say that only a few women can achieve sporting legitimacy without compromising, which encourages girls to either emulate these girls exactly and deliberately alienate themselves from any of their female peers who deviate from the template Excepto-girls set, in order to gain legitimacy, or to give up on sports because they can never achieve this legitimacy in other peoples eyes. Haven’t we got enough boys telling girls they’ll never be legitimate sports people because they’re ‘too girly’, do we need female characters ramming that message home too? Personally I’d rather see a female character who doesn’t conform to the ideal of the feminine becoming a triumphant sporting heroine despite the obstacles put in her way, than a female character who doesn’t conform to the ideal of the feminine becoming the only possible sporting heroine at the expense of erasing any other sportswomen. There’s a difference.

In my opinion Excepto-girl characters perpetuate girl on girl war, even as they redefine gender limits. There are more girl friendly ways to present a sportswoman as an exceptional, positive, non-traditionally female character than isolating her and setting her up as the only serious female sportswoman in her world. There are three levels on any podium and I would hope that if Excepto-girls are identified and critiqued more often I might start to see more narratives with a range of serious sportswomen who can fill all three steps.

My Lovely Horse

I feel like there are never enough fluffy, happy posts here at Bookgazing, so let’s have a totally cheerful, nostalgic Women in Sports post to take us to the weekend. Today I’m going to talk about horses!

Horses are pretty.

Seriously (but still happily, tralalalala) books about horse riding were my first real exposure to girls who were serious about sport. I was mad on )The Saddle Club books by Bonnie Bryant, which featured three girls who were friends and loved riding. I read the series totally out of order (unthinkable now) and would grab whatever books I could find, as long as they had the same horseshoe cover design

as the rest of the series. Yes I was still like that about matching covers when I was twelve.
I know it sounds kind of silly to say that this simple series of books, where girls had crazy adventures with horses taught me BIG THINGS about being a girl, but they really did. I still remember them fondly and not just because they were full of gleaming horses doing cool things like flying changes (when I was younger being able to do the perfect flying change was among one of the super powers I wanted). I never knew I was learning lessons from these books, they were fun and the characters were wonderful and there were so many horses, omg one of them had barrel racing in it... I read them purely because they were fun to read. But when you read that many books with subtle, positive messages you absorb them right into your brain and you come out with some of that good stuff embedded in you. Hopefully this slyly implanted knowledge makes it easier to spot and combat the negative messages about women that are stuffed into other media.

Lessons from ‘The Saddle Club’ (Or If my maths teacher had used horses I would have nailed the long division) :

I learnt that girls friendships could be incredibly strong. Stevie and Carol and Lisa were such great friends. Yay for girls being friends in books. I think that the idea that some women do not learn that women can be friends with women at a young enough age.

(Please note that I do not mean to say that if you are a woman and all your friends are guys you have somehow failed at feminist life and that you should go get some female friends because friendships between women are somehow better. I just think it is important that individual women realise that the rest of the female gender have the potential to be friendly towards women, because women are not intrinsically more ‘insert a negative descriptor here’ towards women than men. To sum up in a sunny, happy way: don’t hate, woman can be nice).

I learnt that girls could be competitive without being huge forces of evil in other girls lives. Stevie, Lisa and Carol were always competing against other horse women and sometimes against each other, but they made it seem so fun, like a way of achieving excellence and being proud of yourself, rather than a way of beating the world and proving yourself to others. I’d say all sports books for teenagers try to teach them about healthy competition, but I think it’s a lesson girls especially need to absorb, because the world will try its best to encourage unhealthy, divisive competition between women. Girls need to be able to see how enjoyable competing can be, because winning is fun and girls should know it’s ok to go out there and strive and win what they want, because again the world will try to convince them this is not how ladies behave. They also need to see how to compete appropriately with other girls. This means competing without slating other girls, despite wanting to win. The girls only spoke badly of other girls when they were hurting the horses through negligence, or bad riding and they tried to be fair, although I admit they might have failed a bunch at being fair about their nemesis Veronica Lake.

I learnt that girls that were capable characters could also be feminine and look after their appearance, but that being feminine and well turned out weren’t the only options for girls. Horse riding novels are really the perfect sport novels to teach this lesson to girls, because you have to get dressed up to compete and you have to pay attention to your horses appearance to impress the judges. At the same time no horse related contest is won on looks alone, as Lisa learns in one adventure where her horse is well turned out, but behaves badly (I swear it’s not as twee as it sounds). The girls spend plenty of time getting messy. One of them is called Stevie and I do love female characters who shorten their names to boy like variations. Stevie was the girl who excelled at dressage, which requires the most rigorous attention to presentation. Complexities – we learn from them.

Most importantly I learnt that sport was for girls. Horse riding was the first sport I ever identified as a positive sport that I might enjoy doing (yeah prescribed, competitive PE will really do in a girls enjoyment of sport, even though it keeps kids healthy). Although I’ve never quite had the cash to take lessons, I’ve been horse riding about five times in my life and do I ever love it! I love to watch it and while I think guys who horse ride are spiffy and I have my favourites, I’m always cheering for the women to win (Ellen Whittaker, Mary King, you kick ass) because I first learnt about horse riding by reading about female characters. Imagine if teenagers all grew up reading about men and women doing every sport, they might start thinking of all sports as women’s sports and men’s sports. They might start a revolution of thinking.

The reason I don’t ride, or do sport right now is not because I think being passionate about sport will make me unfeminine, or doing sport will make me look unfeminine. It’s because I’ve been lazy/can’t afford some of the sports I’d like to do. I like to watch speedway, I took a weight lifting class for about a year and I’m not sheepish about those things because they might make me seem less feminine. I blocked out a decent amount of the ‘sports aren’t for girls’ messages that bombard girls in their teen years because I read books where sport very much was for girls.

I know some people get leery about girls and horses ‘Horses are so girly, there can’t be any of worth in those books can there?’, ‘Don’t horse books just encourage shallow, greedy, pony mad, boy crazy ladies (because for some reason boy crazy and horses are inextricably linked)?’. But I say that noise hurts my ears and this is a happy post, so I’m gonna shut this window now. Novels about horse riding, are novels about girls playing sports and the more of those the better I say.

To make this a super happy, horsey post shall we finish with the happiest horse related song ever? My Lovely Horse makes everyone happier doesn’t it?

I’m still horse mad by the way, so if you have any books about horse women that you’d like to recommend the comments box is wide open.

'Girl Overboard' - Justina Chen Headley

‘Girl Overboard’ by Justina Chen Headley was the book that inspired Bookgazing’s Women in Sport month. Any novel about a snowboarding teenage girl is going to stand out, although I wish I couldn’t say that, I wish there were many well publicised novels about teenage girls who snowboard. When Ari at ‘Reading in Color’ mentioned that ‘Girl Overboard’ is about a Chinese-American teenager from an extremely rich family, I realised just how far ahead it might be in the young adult originality race and put a copy in my basket.

Syrah Cheng is the daughter of Ethan Cheng, the self made telecoms billionaire. She loves snowboarding, but she was recently involved in a reckless snowboarding accident in Whistler and damaged her knee. Since then she hasn’t been able to snowboard and as the book opens she’s just trying to regain her confidence, so she can get back on her board and prove to her family that she can go pro.

I’ve noted in the first paragraph that ‘Girl Overboard’ sounds original and its characters are diverse and unusual in young adult literature. Syrah is a snowboarding sports woman and her Asian family is successful and rich. Neither of these are mainstream character types trending in the literary world. What that quick reference to original character types doesn’t explain is how this novel fleshes out the true, everyday reality of these two types of people. Headley weaves natural, specific details about the Cheng family’s participation in Chinese culture through her novel, which give Syrah’s world a conspicuous feeling of Chinese ethnicity without ever removing the focus of the novel from Syrah’s individual story of snowboarding love. The inclusion of these details don’t open the way for extended teaching moments, but quickly alert readers to simple complexities found within the culture. When Syrah tells the reader about Betty Cheng’s insistence that Syrah speak Cantonese not Mandarin any existing ideas about a monolithic Chinese culture begin to be dispersed. While Syrah’s Chinese heritage is part of who she is, she’s also a girl obsessed with snowboarding and Headley has managed to create a book where Syrah can think about snowboarding tricks and a future career (although sadly there’s less snowboarding than I’d have liked, as Syrah has lost her confidence), without obscuring the fact that Chinese culture naturally swirls through her life every day. The careful balance between these two important parts of Syrah’s life shows that ‘Girl Overboard’ is a novel which understand the multiple areas of interest in each human life.

Headley’s inclusion of comments about different Chinese languages demonstrates her interest in showing readers that Asian culture isn’t homogenous and this is an idea which she reintroduces subtly in a few other ways. Syrah draws a manga journal, an activity which I’ve not yet come across in other books with Asian characters. Manga is an art form that comes from Asian countries originally but drawing manga is not a mainstream, cross generational activity and would probably not factor in a traditional Western summary of typical ‘Asian culture’. Headley wants to make sure readers know that a nation’s culture contains many parts and that Asian characters don’t always have to be thrust into the duality of rejecting or accepting their culture. Instead they can pick and choose from within their own culture, based on their own interests, while also enjoying activities that originated outside their Asian countries. All this is possible without a character having to reject their cultural heritage, or dutiful subscribe to every activity someone might characterise as typical Asian cultural activities. Headley’s attempts to demonstrate the diversity within Asian culture are fantastic and she feels like an author trying to show that there need be no conflict between realism and originality, by thinking of details readers might be surprised to hear about.

While Headley’s rich, successful Asian characters add to the diversity on the young adult shelf Headley has no interest in making the Cheng family a set of one dimensional positive role models. Syrah’s family situation is complicated and painful, despite the public face of Cheng showing how happy their riches are making them. Her mother is a size zero nightmare, determined to make Syrah shed all her body fat. Her step siblings Wayne and Grace, born well before their father made his money, resent Syrah’s easy life. ‘Girl Overboard’ is a journey novel, with multiple emotional journeys for Syrah to make one of which is an emotional journey towards better relations with her family (and a surprising family related revelation which produces just wonderful character connections that I’ll let you discover for yourselves if you read it). Syrah’s quest to get to know her family better is so painful that sometimes I wished she could just shut down and cut them out, but in the end is wonderfully rewarding and probably the strongest and most emotive strand of the novel. I did wish there was a bit more of a confrontational resolution between Syrah and her father, especially once she bonds with her step-sister Grace. Ethan Cheng seems to have been a horrible father in the past. However, I was swept away by Grace and Syrah’s sisterly relationship, the positive influence of her Bao-mu (nanny) on Syrah’s life and Syrah’s mother’s revealed frailties.

The most obvious journey in this novel concentrates on Syrah’s return to the sport she loves, but other areas of her life need to improve for her to gain the confidence to get back on her board. There are at least five other emotional trips for her to make. It’s hard to pick my favourite, because they’re all more exciting than what I think of as being standard journey narratives, but I’d like to take a little time to talk about one area where Syrah’s attitude develops as it provoked equal amounts of joy and ire in me. When it became clear that ‘Girl Overboard’ was going to allow Syrah to find out that some girls could make nice friends I was just a little bit happy. Although I socialise with my friends boyfriends and our almost entirely male workforce, all my close friends are girls and I’m always excited to find books where female friendship grows.

Money doesn’t make Syrah’s personal life any easier either. Having money means she is always suspicious of people who want to be her friend. She finds the girls around her are always looking for freebies. Bombarded with negative messages about her body, who spends lots of time dressed in baggy jeans boarding with boys, she has a hard time feeling really comfortable with girls as they only seem interested in judging her clothes and her weight behind her back, with comments like 'why would she wear boys' clothes when she can buy anything she wants?'. She’s friends with a few guys, but really Age (Adrian Rodriguez) is her only close friend (based on the fact that she doesn’t see, or speak to any of the other guys until the end of the book). So the book begins with Syrah hearing things like 'pretty good for a girl' (paraphrasing) as positive compliments and thinking about how all the girls around her, especially Age’s new girlfriend Natalie, are just poser snowboard girls. Sad to read, but I knew there was a journey of change a-coming so I persevered and eventually Syrah forms an uncertain friendship with a girl called Lillian, connects with her step-sister Grace and meets a female family member who makes her reconsider thinking of fashionable girls as a separate, evil species. She still has female enemies (the unkind Six Pack group), but she’s also learnt that they’re just nasty people and that other girls make great friends, because all girls aren’t inherently horrible. Hurray!

The problem is that despite Syrah ending up with female friends, there’s still subtle girl hatred going on in this book, coming from male characters and from Syrah herself (in my opinion her attitude to Age’s girlfriend is totally unreasonable and should have been addressed, even if readers would still sympathise because Syrah’s the main character and in love with Age). I really hesitate to say that because Justina Chen Headley is the co-founder of readergrlz, the most pro-girl reading community I know of. I want to add that I don’t think the author is trying to slag girls off, I think it’s more that the female gender is slagged off to create an atmosphere of sexist realism and then that girl slagging isn’t qualified explicitly enough to show how wrong it is. It could be that Syrah’s whole storyline and her new friendships with girls like Lillian, Grace and her cousin Jocelyn are intended to show how cool girls can be and quietly qualify the offhand comments, but that doesn’t work for me. Maybe Headley thinks smart girls will work out for themselves that the prescence of a strong confident heroine means disparaging comments about girls should be viewed as wrong, but these kind of attitudes sneak into our lives as jokes, as ribbing, as ‘Great technique, for a girl...’, or 'You're only playing sport because you want to pick up guys...' despite the prescence of many real life strong female role models, so I think these comments could have done with a quick bit of verbal qualification from one of the characters.

I don’t want to concentrate on Syrah’s negative attitudes to other girls too much, because I have a separate post coming about the problem of writing Excepto –Girls when writing sporting novels about women. Excepto-Girls are typically the only girl in the whole novel who is serious about sport and end up being positively contrasted with an impersonal, non-sporty, silly vision of girlhood. I’m afraid, asmuch as I like Syrah, I think she's been written as an Excepto-Girl heroine so she’ll be coming up in that post too. Let me finish with a reminder that there are many, many positive things in the book that made it a joy to read and all those emotional journeys I mentioned above are so interesting. Also Syrah gets involved in charity work and starts organising a sporting event. Geekily I like cool events organisation in books. It is a weird thing, I know. A good choice for Women in Sport month, if a little lacking on the descriptions of sport due to Syrah’s injuries.

Specifically Sporty

What sport/s does the heroine play?

Syrah snow boards. All the women in her family work out in the gym. ‘Girl Overboard’ has a lot to say about body image, so the Cheng women’s gym trips are not always a positive thing. Syrah’s does mention going to the gym for physical therapy and to regain strength, but she also mentions going to the gym because she thinks she is too fat (and Headley is obviously gunning against this mentality with bazukas).

How much sport does the heroine play in this book?

‘Girl Overboard’ is a book about a girl who has been injured by sport, so there isn’t a lot of sport in the book as Syrah is trying to recover her physical fitness and her confidence on her board. There are a couple of scenes where Syrah and her friends snowboard, but not many. If you want to learn lots of technical things about snowboarding, or women competing in snowboarding this novel probably won’t deliver everything you’re after.

Do any other girls play sports besides the heroine?

No. Well, Lilian’s little sister wants to be a snow boarder, but as she is sick she’s not riding in the book. Many background female characters pose on the mountains, or claim an interest in snowboarding, but they are all described as not being serious about snowboarding. I had a really big issue with the fact that Syrah appears as the only serious female snow boarder and she’ll feature in a discussion about sports women and the female sports community later in the month.

Other Reviews

Reading in Color
The Happy Nappy Bookseller
Dear Author
Paper Tigers
The Compulsive Reader

'Dairy Queen' - Catherine Gilbert Murdock

At fifteen years old, DJ Schwenk has become responsible for her families dairy farm. Her dad slipped and injured his hip, leaving him unable to do anything physical. Her mum is working two jobs to support the family. Her two older brothers left the farm abruptly after a fight with their dad and are now pursuing college football careers. As the oldest sibling left on the farm DJ has to do most of the heavy work like milking, mowing and haying. She’s given up playing basketball for her high school team in small town Red Bend and no longer runs for the track team. She’s also failing English literature because she hasn’t had time to write all the required essays. DJ has been taught by example that true, worthy Schwenks don’t quit, talk back or whine, so she just keeps working. Her resentment towards her family silently grows, even though she is a practical girl who understands that she has to take care of the farm so that the family can survive economically.

Catherine Gilbert Murdock takes the time to weave an explicit examination of the importance of expression and communication in forming healthy relationships into ‘Dairy Queen’. By doing so she emphasises the real consequences that can come from anyone, but especially teenagers, being denied expression and understanding. There are many relationships filled with silence and repressed feelings in ‘Dairy Queen’ by Catherine Gilbert Murdock. DJ’s family have taken not talking to epic places. Her father refuses to talk to DJ’s two older brothers Bill and Win after they argued with him last year. DJ only speaks when she needs to. Even when she has something she wants to say it takes her a long time to formulate her ideas and by the time she’s ready to speak other characters have formed ideas about why she’s not talking, or moved on to other topics. Her younger brother Curtis almost never speaks and this is a source of concern for Mrs Schwenk, who has had Curtis tested for autism, but it seems Curtis is just reluctant to open up. The Schwenk household is not a place where open expression is encouraged and is filled with exchanges between DJ and her father that contain little dialogue, but are filled with heavy, foreboding silences:

' There was another long silence. If I had to make this into a movie, I'd have everyone count to twenty-five before saying anything. That's how long the silences were. ' .

All the members of the Schwenk family feel estranged from each other, because they don’t communicate.

As DJ has grown up in a household where silence is the main form of eloquent expression she has trouble expressing herself to other characters. You could say that the default teenage personality is that of the outsider who has trouble expressing themselves, because they feel that no one understands them. Too many standard outsider characters who find it hard to express themselves can exhaust reader sympathy and make the character type seem cliche, so in ‘Dairy Queen’ Catherine Gilbert Murdock has worked hard to distinguish DJ from a mass of other characters that struggle to articulate their feelings.

Readers may be used to characters who think in a cleanly expressed, analytical inner voice, but are inarticulate when they try to verbally express themselves to other characters. DJ presents a new kind of faltering teenage voice, searching for expression. Gilbert Murdock has written her inner monologue as a slow and sometimes fumblingly analysis of events, feelings and concepts, then coupled DJ’s thought process with a taciturn verbal way of expression, which alternates between presenting a reticence to speak, a search for the best way to express her thoughts and a simple, but deep contemplation distilled into its most direct form. An almost real time unrolling of DJ’s deeply engaged, investigative thought process, expressed in simple matter of fact language, allows readers to see how hard she has to work to make her emotions coherent even to herself having grown up in a household that doesn’t encourage expression. Readers are so close to DJ’s way of thinking after sitting inside her head, watching her scrutinize her thoughts before verbalising them that they will feel they understand exactly what she is trying to express. When it is clear how little some characters around DJ understand what she is trying to express I think it becomes clear that it is so eays to misunderstood people, or ignore them because they don’t express themselves in the same way as everybody else:

' "I - you think I did it on purpose?"

"Yeah I mean, who else just sits there waiting like that?"

"You think I'm waiting?" This was getting old, me repeating everything he said. "It's because I don't know what to say! Or I'm trying to figure out wht to say but by the time I get around to figuring it out you're talking again."

"Really?" Brian looked like he didn't believe me. '

Being misunderstood, or having their expression shut down doesn’t only go one way though. DJ is capable of misunderstanding others, like her friend Amber, who it turns out has been in love with her forever. She accidentally brushes off her brother Curtis, when he opens up to her, although she has grown so that she understands how important his moment of openness is and apologises. When she does this readers will understand that DJ isn’t being set up as the singular teenager who ‘no one understands’, but rather as a participant in the huge human game of misunderstandings and bad reactions. Oh people we are so complicated to understand.

Noticing that DJ is struggling to cope family friend Jimmy, the coach of the Hawley football team from the nearby, richer high school, sends his whiney, spoilt quarterback Brian Nelson to help out on the farm. In contrast to the Schwenks Brian Nelson’s family talk a lot, maybe they even talk too much. His mother works in a program called Talk Back and she’s obsessed with asking everyone in her family what they’re feeling. Brian’s dad is overly protective of his son and shields him from any potential criticism, which keeps his son from developing as a football player and a human being. Brian’s family shows that while DJ’s family is not ideal, because they don’t communicate, they’re not a broken, ignorant family who can be ‘fixed’ by following another family’s standards. Brian’s family need to learn to apply communication and support in moderate, reasonable ways, just as the Schwenks need to increase their verbal communication and support. I was personally fond of this message.

Brian isn’t much use on the farm, but then DJ doesn’t exactly help him adapt. Brian was part of the team that mocked her older brother Bill for crying when Red Bend lost a major football game and DJ isn’t pleased about working with him. Still, Brian needs to get fit and Jimi thinks DJ might be the best person to train him. Watching Brian and DJ work to improve the Schwenk farm provided some of my favourite moments, like their initial hard and angry haying session, which delivered a feeling of how hard manual farm work must be and how tough DJ must have been to do it alone:

' Then I got to back the wagon into the barn hayloft so we all could have so much fun unloading. It's not as much work as loading, thank God, because you don't have to walk as much. And you're out of the sun, although it's not as if the hayloft is air-conditioned or anything. Or dust-free. Plus you have to be careful when you stack the hay bales because you're stacking them so high, and if you leave gaps the whole stack could collapse when you're climbing on it and break your leg. But at least Curtis was helping us unload, so we got it done faster. We didn't say too much. '

Maybe it’s cliché to write a description of cleaning with a power washer that turns into a water fight and almost gets romantic, but I don’t care, I loved it.

Yet despite loving the water fight, loving the kiss they share, loving the way they bond over training the big thing that I didn’t like about this book was the romance between Brian and DJ. Simply (to avoid making this longer) I think Brian is a jerk who discovers the joys of being listened to by an equal, but doesn’t try hard enough to really understand how DJ functions. To qualify my dislike of Brian, he is a jerk with problems and the potential for growth (and potentially later books for me to watch him grow in), which is a male, romantic character type I find hard to resist. So although I dislike him, at the same time I kind of want him to tangle his fingers in DJ’s hair. As DJ wants him so much I want her to have him, because she’s worked so hard, grown so much and should get everything she wants.

I think this book made me rethink my stance on love triangles, because if there’s just one guy in a book and the heroine likes him it’s hard for the reader to fully reject him as a romantic partner, unless he’s the biggest monster of all time. If there were more potential romantic partners for DJ in this book then I’d feel happier about rejecting the idea of Brian as a romantic lead, no matter how much DJ wanted him, but as he’s the only guy around and I want her to have everything including fulfilling love I find it hard to wish she’d reject Brian. He’s not that bad right? Gah. So confused and not sure if that made any sense. Anyway Brian and DJ, yes, but no, but yes, but....

I’ve spent a long time talking about the family and emotional aspect of ‘Dairy Queen’, now let’s talk about the sport. DJ eventually comes to realise she can’t be happy just being Brian’s football trainer, she wants a different kind of relationship with football (and with him). She starts training hard and after working out a way to pass English (by writing about the summer that led her to realise she wanted to play football, aha framing device you reveal yourself) she tries out for the Red Bend football team. She is the only girl and while she’s a good player she suspects Red Bend takes her mostly because they are desperate (their team is awful) and she has Schwenk football history behind her. I enjoyed the team bonding, the parts where DJ trained with the team and the final big game moment where Red Bend play Hawley. I did think that in this book the parts about a girl joining a boys organised sports team was expanded on less than I was expecting (but maybe it’s wrong to expect every book about women in sports to make gender conflicts its central them) but the training and football element of this book was substantial. My favourite sporting moments were when DJ talked about how she used to enjoy running:

' ...and just then, just at that moment, I'd stop worrying and just start flying, my legs pumping away without me even thinking, straight for the line.

That's what I was remembering as I ran down the heifer field, and thinking how this was even better because my legs didn't have to wait, they could stretch out as much as they wanted with that feeling like I could run forever...and then because I was feeling so good I just kept running as fast as I ever could right to the goal line. '

and a half time moment in the big game against Hawley where Red Bend begin to join as a team, chanting and howling. As ‘Dairy Queen is the first book in a series I’m expecting lots more sporting moments to come. 'Dairy Queen' is a fun, engaging book with a quiet, thoughtful female narrator who is into sports - a great way to spend a few days.

Specifically Sporty

What sport/s does the heroine take part in?

DJ has always started on the girls basketball team and run track, but now she wants to try out for the football team (this is American football UK readers).

How much sport does the heroine participate in, in this book?

DJ starts training Brian about a quarter of the way into the book, but it’s not until much later that she realises she might want to play football. Then she starts training independently. She then trains with the Red Bend team and we see DJ play a couple of games. Overall I’d say there’s a solid proportion of sport played by the heroine in relation to the personal issues she experiences off the field.

Do any other girls play sports besides the heroine?

DJ’s best friend Amber also plays basketball. Her other friend Kiri usually plays volleyball during football season, as do Amber and DJ, but they think volleyball sucks, so Kiri quits to be a cheerleader for the football team.

Other Reviews

subverting the text

Pump It Up - It's Women In Sport month

As promised November is ‘Women in Sport’ month here at Bookgazing. This might seem like an odd theme month for me as I always say I’m not a huge sports fan.

I find football (the only sport that seems to count in this country) unbelievably dull and the characters that populate the men’s game (the only game that gets screen time on the main five channels) so frustrating and ridiculously overpaid. I will admit to a soft spot for Ronaldo and Lampard, but that is it. It’s rare for me to be really interested in sports where players only compete in a team (psychoanalyse me through the frame of that comment all you want). There need to be individual contests alongside team events for me to be interested.

When it comes to reading about sport though I lap everything up, all kinds of team and individual win, lose, injury stories. Maybe it’s because I was allowed to watch the first Mighty Ducks movie on repeat when I was growing up, or because the sporting narrative got pumped in through my eyeballs as I read masses of ‘Saddle Club’ books. I know lots of people used to be disparaging about girls reading ‘horse books’ but they’re really a great place for teenage girls to see women get involved in sport – and again more on that later this month. However it happened I grew up with little interest in playing sports (because I was terrible and people seem to care about that) but hungry for sporting narratives.

The one sport that I follow regularly is speedway, which is very much about the men, but looking around the net it looks like female riders might be gathering together to get more visibility in the sport – hopefully more on that later this month. The contests I find myself most interested in outside of speedway, are sports which have a history of promoting both genders competitions at the same time: athletics, swimming, cycling and equestrian events are all sports I love to watch.

Here’s the potential book pool for this month’s reading:

‘Girl Overboard’ – Justina Chen Headley: The heroine is a Chinese American snowboarder who has to learn to cope with a serious injury that keeps her off the slopes. This is a book Ari made me notice so I’m expecting good things.

‘Derby Girl’ – Shauna Cross: The book that led to the film ‘Whip It’ (which I haven’t seen yet). Do you remember watching that episode of ‘Clarissa Explains It All’ where Sam’s mum comes home from the roller derby – wicked! I so want to organise a trip to see roller derby in the UK next year, so if you’re interested in a jaunt be sure to get in contact.

‘Swimming’ – Nicola Keegan: Self explanatory title. I won this from Simon at Savidge Reads, so I guess he’s kind of an unofficial sponsor of this themed month ;)

’Twenty Miles’ – Cara Hedley: Coleen talked about this novel which features an ice skater who joins a women’s ice hockey team after her father dies. Since I think Coleen is a genius at picking great books I bought this book right away and now seems the time to crack it open.

‘Dairy Queen’ –Catherine Murdock: I guarantee if you ask for recommendations for young adult books about sport this book will be mentioned. Tomboy, American football playing heroine, who according to the blurb isn’t great at using her words. I’m reading this right now.

I also have some ideas for extra posts on this theme, but I fancy creating a bit of mystery around what they’ll be about, so watch out for theme posts popping up.

I know this is a young adult heavy month (‘Swimming’ is an adult novel with a teenage protagonist and all the rest are young adult novels) and I hope I’m not turning off those of you who prefer adult novels. As you can see from the list of holiday reads I put up yesterday there will be reviews of adult novels a plenty in December so hopefully you’ll come back after theme week (or discover a love of YA during theme week – YA, I tempts you with it like it is delicious cookies).

I am Returned!

Portugal was awesome, the UK can suck it (just for this week, I will get back to loving it next week). It was not a disaster holiday! We did have quite a bit of rain towards the end, but we had five days of beautiful sunshine and one day where we spent time at and left the beach before the rain came down. I'm sorry I don't have better pictures, but all the main ones are on my friends camera so you'll have to settle for a picture of our hotel pool that I took on my phone as she dips her toe into the freezing water (I am brave and did a whole width later in the week). Possibly more photos soon.

We got dressed up and had a posh meal in the old, beautiful part of Albufiera (which we travelled to the tourist way – on the land train). We went for cocktails on the strip twice. We visited the zoo marina and saw the world’s oldest bottle nosed dolphin. The rest of the time we spent relaxing, reading books, drinking ridiculously large gins (oh bar people in Europe we love your use of the swish and drizzle style of pouring spirits), enjoying our own private pool in the mornings (other people were way more morning excursiony than we were) and eating SO much foooooood. Algarvian chicken – I do not even care if that is not a real, traditional food, it was soooo good. The only blip was, well, guess which UK airport we flew back into and guess who flew back alone for the first time.

This is the quickest holiday update ever because it is November and that means it is Women in Sport month here at Bookgazing. More on that tomorrow, as well as more on my super special involvement in an end of year project that lots of you know about anyway because I asked you to be involved. For now just a brief buzz on what I read before I went away:

‘Anila’s Journey’ – Mary Finn: Really enjoyable, if you don’t think too hard about how the plot works (I only started noticing plot holes after I’d finished, so it was very enjoyable to read). Loved the main character and the descriptions of India. This book has also sparked a post idea about writing historically exceptional characters.

‘Speak’ - Laurie Halse Anderson: WuOooow. Quite a painful book to read and perhaps I’m over estimating how good it was technically because it cut down so deep, so easily into my emotions. My gut instinct tells me this was a well written book. Cass, maree, you were right I did have to step back at certain points.

While I was on holiday I read:

‘In for a Penny’ – Rose Lerner: So much fun. I giggled throughout. There were some small issues for me (and if there’s a related sequel about the cast off mistress and the stiff, rejected suitor I might find it very hard to believe), but I was very, very pleased about many things, especially that Amy, the mistress survived. No modern writer should be casually writing conveniently dead mistresses into their historical fiction – good going Rose Lerner.

‘A Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman’ - Friedrich Christian Delius: Probably not the ideal holiday read, because of it being written as one long sentence, but the writing style is technically interesting and the character portrait of a young woman in a foreign country felt very true. Expect me to spend lots of time talking about how the author works to distance his character from Nazi Germany, without making her and exceptionally liberal member of German society – masterful and yet also slightly troubling.

‘A la Carte’ – Tanita S Davis: Thanks to everyone who recommended taking this book as it was just right for holiday. Not quite perfect like Mare’s War, but I’m digesting whether the issues I saw were in there deliberately, as teaching moments, or whether they just crept in and added a bit of meta to the novel. One of those books where the first person voice is spot on and fun to read along with.

‘The Comedians’ – Graham Greene: I’m half way through this and reminded of how awesome Graham Greene is (although I think this is the first time I noticed Greene being racist). I am a huge Greene fangirl and this is my fourth book by him.

More about all of these books in December hopefully. Now on to theme week :)

Did you all have lovely weeks wherever you were? What have you been up to? I’m on a catch up spree, so hopefully should be by a few blogs even if I can’t leave comments. Speak soon everyone.