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A review by inkdrinkerreads
We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry
4.0
“Every three hundred years or so, our kind gets loosed upon an unsuspecting world. And this time around, the history books would know us as the 1989 Danvers High School Women's Varsity Field Hockey Team."
This uproarious high school comedy drama is charming in every sense of the word and for the first half of the novel I was sure this was to become a new firm favourite of mine. The very premise is brilliant: sick of losing every game, a Field Hockey team pledges their devotion to the eternal darkness (i.e an Emilio Estevez notebook) to change their luck on the pitch. To keep their bond alive, the group each tie a ragged blue band across their arms and, under the nefarious influence of Emilio, begin to engage in increasingly rebellious behaviours. As their luck changes, so too does the fate of the girls’ high school careers.
Dense with 80’s American pop-culture and witchcraft mythology (the book is set in modern-day Salem and the title is a line from ‘The Crucible’), Barry’s novel presents the magical power of teenage girls and the bonds they forge. It is, often, absolutely hilarious but Barry infuses her narrative with just enough ominous darkness to build tension and foreboding.
However, this doesn’t quite pay off. I adored this book for the first half but the recurring gags (a sentient hairstyle known as The Claw, in particular) lose their magic the more they are used and the book takes sooo long to get through. The use of first person plural perspective (“we”) is interesting and helps to convey the uncanny connection between the hockey team, but Barry’s choice to offer the backstory of each and every one of the eleven drags out and slows down the book far too much. A reliance on whimsy and self-indulgence gets in the way of narrative tension and I found the conclusion to be unexpectedly disappointing.
That being said, Barry’s writing is, for the most part, wonderfully inventive and enchanting. Her characters are both compelling and relatable and the 80s nostalgia is fun even for a child of later decades. I had a great time with this book and I think it has a lot to say about what it means to be a teenager swept up by shared purpose and hysteria. Like the girls hung as witches in the 1600s, the Danvers “Falcons” may not have cavorted with the devil or flown upon their sticks, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t believe in their own dark magic. Barry suggests that desire and wanting can be its own form of witchcraft for teenage girls- something I’m sure many will recognise from their own frustrated adolescence.
This uproarious high school comedy drama is charming in every sense of the word and for the first half of the novel I was sure this was to become a new firm favourite of mine. The very premise is brilliant: sick of losing every game, a Field Hockey team pledges their devotion to the eternal darkness (i.e an Emilio Estevez notebook) to change their luck on the pitch. To keep their bond alive, the group each tie a ragged blue band across their arms and, under the nefarious influence of Emilio, begin to engage in increasingly rebellious behaviours. As their luck changes, so too does the fate of the girls’ high school careers.
Dense with 80’s American pop-culture and witchcraft mythology (the book is set in modern-day Salem and the title is a line from ‘The Crucible’), Barry’s novel presents the magical power of teenage girls and the bonds they forge. It is, often, absolutely hilarious but Barry infuses her narrative with just enough ominous darkness to build tension and foreboding.
However, this doesn’t quite pay off. I adored this book for the first half but the recurring gags (a sentient hairstyle known as The Claw, in particular) lose their magic the more they are used and the book takes sooo long to get through. The use of first person plural perspective (“we”) is interesting and helps to convey the uncanny connection between the hockey team, but Barry’s choice to offer the backstory of each and every one of the eleven drags out and slows down the book far too much. A reliance on whimsy and self-indulgence gets in the way of narrative tension and I found the conclusion to be unexpectedly disappointing.
That being said, Barry’s writing is, for the most part, wonderfully inventive and enchanting. Her characters are both compelling and relatable and the 80s nostalgia is fun even for a child of later decades. I had a great time with this book and I think it has a lot to say about what it means to be a teenager swept up by shared purpose and hysteria. Like the girls hung as witches in the 1600s, the Danvers “Falcons” may not have cavorted with the devil or flown upon their sticks, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t believe in their own dark magic. Barry suggests that desire and wanting can be its own form of witchcraft for teenage girls- something I’m sure many will recognise from their own frustrated adolescence.