Book Club: Come Discuss ‘Headshot,’ by Rita Bullwinkel
Welcome to the Book Review Book Club. Every month, we select a book to discuss on our podcast and with our readers. Please leave your thoughts on this month’s book in this article’s comments. And be sure to check out some of our past conversations, including ones about “James,” by Percival Everett, and “Demon Copperhead,” by Barbara Kingsolver.
“Andi Taylor is pumping her hands together, hitting her own flat stomach, thinking not of her mother sitting at home with her little brother, not of her car, which barely got her here, not of her summer job, her lifeguarding at the overcrowded community pool, not of the 4-year-old she watched die, the 4-year-old she practically killed, and his blue cheeks. … She’s thinking about the things she always does wrong when she fights. … She is also thinking about the way Artemis Victor will get her.”
So begins Rita Bullwinkel’s novel, “Headshot,” about the fierce and competitive world of youth women’s boxing.
The story follows eight teenagers fighting in the Daughters of America Cup, a tournament staged in a dilapidated gym in Reno. The novel is structured around the tournament’s bracket, each chapter detailing a match between fighters, bout after bout, until finally a champion is declared.
The drama of the novel is twofold. We are thrown into the high-octane theater of each fight, as the boxers work to land punches and defeat their opponents. (“Rachel Doricko plans to destroy Kate Heffer in well-formed increments.”) But we also explore each girl’s life — the novel flashes into the past to see the baggage that each carries; into the future to see what will happen to each once her boxing career is over; and into the girls’ minds in the present, as they reckon with their intense desires to make something of themselves. (“Here, at the Daughters of America tournament, Tanya Maw is a fighter. But she is also just a child — just a girl waiting to see what her life will be like compared to the lives of the other people she knows.”)
