skygiants | (no subject)

I was recommended We Ride Upon Sticks and bought it like two years ago in the heights of my full-blown pandemic book-specific retail therapy, but I've only just recently gotten around to reading it. Sometimes one has to wait until the time is right! Anyway, I then promptly recommended this extremely Masshole book to a lot of local friends, because, among other sterling qualities Quan Barry understands the historical fact that the Salem witch trials in fact took place in what is now present-day Danvers and not aggressively spooky Salem next door.

The premise, specifically, is "so the Danvers High Field Hockey Team pledge themselves to a dark power in order to win the 1989 field hockey championship." The dark power is called Emilio because the team members write their vows and subsequent Dark Deeds in a sparkly Emilio Estevez notebook belonging to foul-mouthed French Canadian goalie Mel Bouchard, if this gives you perhaps a sense of the tone.

Other team members include The Nerd, The Popular One (Upper Class), The Popular One (Lower Class), The One With Triple A Cups (uncomfortable), The One Black Kid, The One Korean Kid, The One Extremely Christian Adopted Vietnamese Kid, The One Boy*, The One Whose Family Runs A Very Nice Farm, and The One Who Is Descended From The Original Salem Putnams (her name is Abby Putnam and she is a very pleasant, wholesome jock who spends the entire book eating tremendous amounts of high-potassium fruit and giving pleasant, wholesome jock advice like "friends, all I can say is don't do anything you don't wanna do.") None of these are really any more main-character-y than the others and all of them go on their ownw individual journeys, although Jen Fiorenza's Claw (intensely hairsprayed bangs which fairly on gain sentience and become their own powerful magical entity) gives her perhaps more prominence than some of the others; the book is narrated in first person plural, a choice which I had no problems with from the beginning but really delighted me a third of the way through when the reveal came that the team had started to become a telepathic semi-hivemind.

In general the energy of the text is pretty lighthearted, interspersed with increasingly ominous hints that the whole situation is going to end with Something Dramatic And Dire; however, it does not! Self-actualization only! I'm a little torn on this, because structurally I feel a little bit cheated of climax/catharsis to have all that building narrative energy dissolve in a puff of 'actually we decided not to and it was fine' but emotionally of couorse I am very happy that everyone is okay and living their best lives at the end of the book. Regardless I had a great time and enjoyed it very much!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

chestnut_pod

Oh, so glad you read and enjoyed this! Completely delightful to me and an excellent gift book. And then Quan Barry's next novel was a moving and subdued meditation on Tibetan Buddhism! The range!

From:

skygiants

ah I'm so glad you liked it too! I've been wondering about Barry's other books, this definitely sounds like a fascinating swerve .... there was one before We Ride Upon Sticks too, right? Do you know anything about it?

From:

chestnut_pod

I think Sticks was actually the swerve! I haven’t read the first one, but its description makes it sound like another sort of marvelous real family saga, this time in late 20th C Vietnam.

Edited Date: 2022-08-29 02:14 am (UTC)

From:

kore

Ha, this sounds great! I love the notebook.

From:

skygiants

Emilio gets a lot of play over the course of the book!

From:

vass

That sounds like a lot of fun.

So... do they use the phrase "H-E-double hockey sticks" that is just sitting there waiting to be used?

From:

skygiants

sk;ldfj I can't actually remember ... they must at LEAST once. They do do a lot of intense occult ritual call-and-responsing of field field field / hockey hockey hockey though!

From:

lirazel

OH WOW. I...must read this.

From:

skygiants

I had a WONDERFUL time.

From:

troisoiseaux

Aaaaand I just put this on hold on Libby. (I am very excited for the narrative POV twist! That sounds super fun.)

From:

skygiants

That was definitely the moment when the book went from "pretty good" to "HELL YES" for me, it's just such a clever turn! I hope you enjoy it. :D

From:

bloodygranuaile

Danvers has the DECENCY to be properly ASHAMED of its history whereas Salem is like "We will do a strange anti-Puritan form of penance for next door's sins by becoming a big weird expensive party forever, would you like to buy a custom felted witch hat"

Anyway this sounds like an incredibly fun book; I may have to check it out once I've worked my way through this spooky season's Very Serious Spooky Season Reading

From:

skygiants

There's a very funny scene where the Danvers team goes to play against the Salem team and then find themselves a Salem Halloween parade ... great times. This is an author who has very much been to Salem and has definitely seen all the custom felted witch hats. Recommended spooky season reading for sure!

From:

oracne

This sounds amazing.

From:

skygiants

Extremely good conceit and great execution!

From:

sophia_sol

ooh this sounds delightfully weird

From:

skygiants

It's very charming! simultaneously very surreal and very grounded in a way that balanced out for an extremely fun read overall

From:

cofax7

As a high school athlete from the Boston suburbs myself (class of 82) I found this entirely entertaining. So vivid, bright back a lot of memories. Did a great job with the world building!

That said, I found it frustrating that I never knew who the narrator was...

Edited Date: 2022-08-27 03:39 am (UTC)

From:

skygiants

yesss I am glad to hear that; it felt grounded to me but obviously I did not arrive in the Boston area until much later, so it's nice to have the confirmation! (Though I actually loved that the narrator was understood to be The Collective, rather than any one specific girl, and that the sort of different impressions and conclusions presented were all understood to have been arrived at post-facto by consensus -- it felt like such a cool unique way to do POV.)

From:

cofax7

Concur, it was a really cool way to do POV. And I LOVED the CLAW. So fun. Weird but very entertaining book.

From:

sovay

I'm a little torn on this, because structurally I feel a little bit cheated of climax/catharsis to have all that building narrative energy dissolve in a puff of 'actually we decided not to and it was fine' but emotionally of couorse I am very happy that everyone is okay and living their best lives at the end of the book.

I had to leave this post here.

From:

skygiants

I DO FREQUENTLY THINK THE CATHARSIS IS FUN IS THE THING

but I also think it's fun when eleven teenage girls have enjoyably empowering experimentation with Being A Little Bit Magically Evil and come to no real harm in doing so, I'm pretty easy to please

From:

shati

It was Danvers??

From:

skygiants

Danvers was Salem Village! and changed their name I assume from embarrassment

From:

sholio

Commenting late because I had never heard of this if not for your post, bought it, finally got around to reading it and really enjoyed it despite also feeling torn about the lack of anything dire or dark happening as a result of all the very clear narrative cues that the book is building up to something terrible that simply Doesn't Happen. I liked what the book was, in the end, and don't think I would have necessarily wanted a big apocalyptic climax, but also it does end up feeling like a whole lot of random, basically unconnected events that the girls simply grow out of, and I'm not sure that's what I expected or wanted, necessarily?

But I did enjoy it and appreciated having heard about it here!

Edited Date: 2023-07-22 08:10 am (UTC)