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Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel, “Headshot,” follows eight teenagers fighting in the Daughters of America Cup, a youth women’s boxing tournament staged in a dilapidated gym in Reno. Each chapter details a match between fighters, bout after bout, until finally a champion is declared.
We are thrown into the high-octane theater of each fight, as the boxers work to defeat their opponents. But we also explore each girl’s life, with flashes into the past and the future and into the girls’ minds as they reckon with their intense desires to make something of themselves.
In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Lauren Christensen. Caution: Spoilers abound.
They also discuss comments and questions that readers submitted. If you’ve read “Headshot” and want to join the conversation, we’d love to hear your reactions in the comments. We’ll get you started:
MJ Franklin: “I like playing sports, but I don’t like watching sports. I start to wander off. And so I was like, I don’t know if this is for me. But then I heard so many people recommending it, I dove in. And I’m glad I did, because I was obsessed. Like, I immediately wanted to talk to people about it. There’s an energy to this book. The high-octane pulse of the ring is so hypnotic, but then … the writing is so skilled and dexterous.” …
Joumana Khatib: “It was fun to see how a lot of very quintessential teenage themes, like control or self-determination or just having some kind of dominion over your own body, which is something that I think is really held at arm’s length for a lot of women of this age, was getting enacted in this way. That was something that I responded the most to. And then also how skilled these girls were with a type of intelligence that I could never have. That was really exciting to read about. I was like, Oh, that does seem nice — like, when you land a punch, that must be a good feeling.” …
Lauren Christensen: “It’s a real feat that Bullwinkel is able to give us a visceral sense of what these bodies look like, feel like, how they match up against each other, who’s bigger, who’s stronger, who’s taller, who’s weaker, who has this hook, for people who are admittedly not already versed in boxing speak.”
We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.
