Book Club: Come Discuss ‘Headshot,’ by Rita Bullwinkel

Welcome to the Book Review Book Club. Every month, we select a book to discuss on our podcast and with our readers. Please leave your thoughts on this month’s book in this article’s comments. And be sure to check out some of our past conversations, including ones about “James,” by Percival Everett, and “Demon Copperhead,” by Barbara Kingsolver.

“Andi Taylor is pumping her hands together, hitting her own flat stomach, thinking not of her mother sitting at home with her little brother, not of her car, which barely got her here, not of her summer job, her lifeguarding at the overcrowded community pool, not of the 4-year-old she watched die, the 4-year-old she practically killed, and his blue cheeks. … She’s thinking about the things she always does wrong when she fights. … She is also thinking about the way Artemis Victor will get her.”

So begins Rita Bullwinkel’s novel, “Headshot,” about the fierce and competitive world of youth women’s boxing.

The story follows eight teenagers fighting in the Daughters of America Cup, a tournament staged in a dilapidated gym in Reno. The novel is structured around the tournament’s bracket, each chapter detailing a match between fighters, bout after bout, until finally a champion is declared.

The drama of the novel is twofold. We are thrown into the high-octane theater of each fight, as the boxers work to land punches and defeat their opponents. (“Rachel Doricko plans to destroy Kate Heffer in well-formed increments.”) But we also explore each girl’s life — the novel flashes into the past to see the baggage that each carries; into the future to see what will happen to each once her boxing career is over; and into the girls’ minds in the present, as they reckon with their intense desires to make something of themselves. (“Here, at the Daughters of America tournament, Tanya Maw is a fighter. But she is also just a child — just a girl waiting to see what her life will be like compared to the lives of the other people she knows.”)

Which is to say: “Headshot” is a novel about boxing, yes, but it’s also a novel about the existential maelstrom of teenage girlhood.

For June’s Book Review Podcast book club, we’re chatting about “Headshot,” by Rita Bullwinkel. The discussion will air on June 28, and we’d love for you to join the conversation. Share your thoughts about the novel in the comments section of this article by June 21, and we may mention your observations in the episode.

Here’s some related reading to get the conversation started:

• Our critic Dwight Garner’s review of the novel: “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. It contains no bogus psychologizing. Its wide-awake characters put me in mind of the singer Ian Dury’s immortal comment: ‘I’m not here to be remembered, I’m here to be alive.’” [Read the full review here.]

• Bullwinkel’s interview with Olivia Parkes in Electric Literature: “In order to come to a match, in order to come to compete in something, you have to build the narrative in your mind that it’s the most important thing you’ll ever do. I’m interested in that dichotomy, of being forced to build a world for yourself that is so disparate from the world that society sees around you.” [Read the full interview here.]

• Kristen Roupenian’s review, for The New York Times Book Review, of Bullwinkel’s previous story collection, “Belly Up”: “In Bullwinkel’s creepy, deadpan debut, bodies become objects, objects become bodies, and bodies and objects fuse and part in fascinating, unsettling ways. For readers with the stomach for it, the book is full of squirmy pleasures.” [Read the full review here.]

We can’t wait to discuss the book with you. In the meantime, happy June and happy reading!