Boxing clever: Headshot, by Rita Bullwinkel, reviewed

Rita Bullwinkel’s knockout debut novel adopts the structure of the boxing tournament it vividly describes. Eight teenage girls are competing in the ‘Daughters of America Cup’ at Bob’s Boxing Palace, Reno. We encounter them in the ring as they progress through four opening rounds and two semis to the final.

The author details the exhilarating, pummelling progress of the fights – ‘the hit is quick, like a jump rope whipping forward’ – and the physicality of the girls’ bodies, ‘so close to each other that, from far away they look like two parts of the same animal’. She also nimbly delves beneath the protective headgear into the girls’ interior worlds and circles out to explore their life stories, revealing where they have come from and where they’re going.

In the first bout, Andi Taylor – still haunted by having found her father dead ‘on the couch’ and by the body of a boy with a ‘corn-dog-sized thigh’ she pulled too late to the surface of the pool while lifeguarding – is pitted against Artemis Victor. The latter wants to become the ‘most fabled, the most brutal, the most beautiful of the Victor sisters, so that a secret door will open for her, out into the world, away from her family’.

Next up is Rachel Doricko, inspired to think she’s ‘a wildfire’ by the blaze that destroyed her San Diego home when she was six, vs Kate Heffer, who recites the first 50 digits of pi and will become an event planner. Then come the cousins Izzy and Iggy Lang. Izzy, two years older, is thrown by a memory of when they both first saw the ocean and Iggy (who will become a private investigator) called it ‘the sea’:

Izzy didn’t even know that there was another word for ocean… but here Iggy was, already being able to see that a thing could be two things at the same time.

The fourth opening bout is between Rose Mueller, who will be ‘a villager, one of those people who dies within a mile of the place they were born’, and Tanya Maw, already drawn towards an acting career because, along with boxing, it’s one of the ‘few activities that allow the intimacy of staring’.