It takes focus and discipline and a certain single-mindedness to become a good prize fighter. It takes those same qualities to write a book as fresh and strong and sinuous as Headshot ... Make room, American fiction, for a meaningful new voice ... To remark that Bullwinkel is observant about Reno and its casinos would be an understatement ... There is no whimsy in Headshot. Instead, there is astringency ... The impact of this novel, though, lasts a long time, like a sharp fist to your shoulder. It is so enveloping to read that you feel, at times, that you are writing it in your own mind.
Like a fighter with excellent footwork — it has a sturdy base yet moves quickly ... Her prose, meanwhile, is aptly crisp and, at times, beguilingly strange ... Dazzlingly unusual.
Bullwinkel’s conceit could’ve leant itself to oversimple takeaways: to meditations on, or sendups of, the bootstraps myth; to meditations on, or sendups of, girl bosses. The omniscient narrator does sometimes zoom out to make sharp, anthropological comments about the coaches’ less-than-noble motivations ... But these moments...aren’t usually didactic or heavy-handed. Instead, these ideas are made particular with metaphor and strange details, which expand time poetically in each scene ... This movement between graceful meditation and descriptions of fighting allows for both a dignified and a critical treatment of boxing.
Bullwinkel makes surprising and shrewd connections between the world of this one tournament and the other hidden worlds that girls build in plain sight ... A fearless and faithful rendering of what it’s like to inhabit the secret world of girls—the disorientation, the violence, the delusions of grandeur, the simultaneous intimacy with and alienation from one another—through the eyes of eight competitors at the very edge of girlhood, playing the last hand-clapping game of their lives.
Bullwinkel’s rhythmic, muscular prose matches the visceral, sometimes stomach-churning material ... Stylistically, she takes risks ... She gives agency to a group of girls who might not otherwise be seen and shows them to us in the full flush of youth, striving for recognition and glory.
Boxing has inspired some of the best sports writing, and we can now add American author Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel to an expansive canon ... Bullwinkel’s writing is as poignant and visceral as the sport demands, her words inhabiting the thoughts and bodies of her characters.
Feels like the complete deal in a way we rarely see in debut fiction: efficient, forceful, just messy enough to be interesting and leaving space in the ring for the reader.
Knockout ... The author details the exhilarating, pummelling progress of the fights ... Vivid ... Fighting is shown to be an essential part of what it is to be a girl, an undeniable, animal part of femininity.
A brilliant conceit for a book. Bullwinkel is pretty good on the actual boxing ... Above all the book displays great affection towards its characters. Insightful, bold and accomplished, Headshot is also heartfelt.
Vigorous ... Like an ambitious athlete, Bullwinkel sets a high bar for herself to clear by severely limiting the structure of her story ... What keeps Headshot from collapsing under the weight of its affectations is Bullwinkel’s idiosyncratic eye for detail and her committed compassion for these girls, and the women they’ll eventually become.
Again and again, Bullwinkel emphasizes the indignity of the contest ... It’s a strange move for a novelist to center an entire plot on a competition that barely seems worth it. Yet this is also Headshot’s greatest strength. The story becomes less about who will win than about what drives each girl toward a battle with no obvious reward. Bullwinkel makes us into fans.
Impressive ... Her writing is deft, incisive, at times stunning, the literary equivalent of a sharp left hook ... Elegant ... Despite or perhaps because of this scope, there is a remarkably condensed quality to the storytelling, lives reduced to their essence.
The author writes with intimate knowledge of boxing, of how the girls move and hit each other and how their bodies react to these blows. This is a special little world for girls and by girls—outside of a few family members and a handful of disinterested male coaches, they’re the only people there—that Bullwinkel draws with grit and grace.
Smashing ... The fragile lives of her weekend warriors are faithfully portrayed in prose that is intelligible but never commonplace, virtuosic yet grounded. Bullwinkel’s knockout performance mops the floor with rank pretenders.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
