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We Ride Upon Sticks - Quan Barry
Jul. 21st, 2023 11:10 pmI finished this tonight after reading it in bits and pieces over the last week or so! I am VERY tentatively using my horror tag on this because it really isn't horror in any meaningful sense, but I imagine it would be pleasant reading during the fall season because there's a ton of Salem/witch/spooky ambiance.
This is a breezy, funny, very readable comedy/absurdist magical realism/coming-of-age book about a girls' hockey team in Massachusetts (Salem area) in the 1980s who sell their souls to the devil (or more accurately to Emilio Estevez, kept by one of the girls in the sort of celebrity binder shrine that almost everybody had in the '80s) to win the state championship. I almost put it down a number of times in the first few chapters due to an almost complete lack of interest in either high school sports or the minutiae of life as a suburban teenager, in the 80s or otherwise. But the voice is strong enough to carry it - I think it says a lot that I was pretty thoroughly hooked despite finding almost everything about the actual subject matter very much not my thing.
It's just very intensely itself. This book absolutely commits. It wasn't always what I wanted, but I deeply admire its commitment to being the incredibly unique thing that it is, and in the end I liked what it was.
We Ride Upon Sticks has the extremely unusual narrative voice of first person plural ("we"), with no specific individual team member narrating, but rather a general sense that the narration is by the team as a whole entity ("we did this that summer"), switching in and out of all of their individual POVs as we get a feel for the individual lives of 11 different characters. It works without being confusing even before this central spoiler of the book: ( The spoiler in question )
I think it gives you a pretty accurate idea of the book's general style (in addition to selling their souls to Emilio Estevez) that one girl's bouffant 80s hairdo is referred to as The Claw, has its own narration, and gives the others orders, and it's entirely unclear (in most cases, anyway) whether this is actually happening and whether anyone else can hear it, but it's exactly on par with other weirdness of the "being a teenager is just strange, man" variety such as locker vandalism, parental shenanigans, and the ongoing question of whether one of the adult coaches is having an affair with one of the kids or if this is just the result of the teenage gossip mill acting out for shock value.
One thing I did truly like is that the book skipped past a lot of low-hanging narrative fruit about teenagehood, especially since all 11 of the team members are given equal weight in the narrative: the kids aren't relentlessly bullied, although bullies and cliques are obviously present in their lives; their home lives are weird and complicated but neither idyllic nor miserable; the two Asian kids, one Black kid, and multiple queer kids in the group all have their own things going on. The team members' triumphs and their tragedies are the kinds of petty things that happen in high school, have all the meaning in the world to them at the time, and may or may not matter that much later on.
In light of that, I had mixed feelings about a major aspect of where the book turned out to be going: ( It's all spoilers from here )
p.s. You can read another review of the book at Skygiants' DW, which is where I heard about it. (Contains spoilers.)
This is a breezy, funny, very readable comedy/absurdist magical realism/coming-of-age book about a girls' hockey team in Massachusetts (Salem area) in the 1980s who sell their souls to the devil (or more accurately to Emilio Estevez, kept by one of the girls in the sort of celebrity binder shrine that almost everybody had in the '80s) to win the state championship. I almost put it down a number of times in the first few chapters due to an almost complete lack of interest in either high school sports or the minutiae of life as a suburban teenager, in the 80s or otherwise. But the voice is strong enough to carry it - I think it says a lot that I was pretty thoroughly hooked despite finding almost everything about the actual subject matter very much not my thing.
It's just very intensely itself. This book absolutely commits. It wasn't always what I wanted, but I deeply admire its commitment to being the incredibly unique thing that it is, and in the end I liked what it was.
We Ride Upon Sticks has the extremely unusual narrative voice of first person plural ("we"), with no specific individual team member narrating, but rather a general sense that the narration is by the team as a whole entity ("we did this that summer"), switching in and out of all of their individual POVs as we get a feel for the individual lives of 11 different characters. It works without being confusing even before this central spoiler of the book: ( The spoiler in question )
I think it gives you a pretty accurate idea of the book's general style (in addition to selling their souls to Emilio Estevez) that one girl's bouffant 80s hairdo is referred to as The Claw, has its own narration, and gives the others orders, and it's entirely unclear (in most cases, anyway) whether this is actually happening and whether anyone else can hear it, but it's exactly on par with other weirdness of the "being a teenager is just strange, man" variety such as locker vandalism, parental shenanigans, and the ongoing question of whether one of the adult coaches is having an affair with one of the kids or if this is just the result of the teenage gossip mill acting out for shock value.
One thing I did truly like is that the book skipped past a lot of low-hanging narrative fruit about teenagehood, especially since all 11 of the team members are given equal weight in the narrative: the kids aren't relentlessly bullied, although bullies and cliques are obviously present in their lives; their home lives are weird and complicated but neither idyllic nor miserable; the two Asian kids, one Black kid, and multiple queer kids in the group all have their own things going on. The team members' triumphs and their tragedies are the kinds of petty things that happen in high school, have all the meaning in the world to them at the time, and may or may not matter that much later on.
In light of that, I had mixed feelings about a major aspect of where the book turned out to be going: ( It's all spoilers from here )
p.s. You can read another review of the book at Skygiants' DW, which is where I heard about it. (Contains spoilers.)