HEADSHOT by Rita Bullwinkel

It is tempting, when talking about Rita Bullwinkel’s debut, to fall back on pugilistic cliche. I’ll resist, only to say that Headshot is the best boxing novel I can remember reading. Set in Reno during the Daughters of America Cup, the flagship tournament of the Young Women’s Boxing Association, where teen girls battle it out in the ring to become the best of a class seemingly nobody cares about, it is so perceptive, so brilliantly structured and executed that it is hard to believe it’s Bullwinkel’s first book.

With each chapter centring on an individual fight, we come to know and understand these kids; what makes them fight, how they got there, where life will take them. The exhilarating blow by blow is interspersed with quirky, unexpected cutaways. It’s a brutal poetic; gorgeously composed sentences that brim with philosophical insight, yet wildly entertaining. By the end I was fully invested not only in the outcome of the tournament but in the girls themselves. It’s probably the best book I’ve read this year, and thats coming from someone who couldn’t give a toss about sport, and drops like a sack of potatoes at the mere sight of a clenched fist.

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel
Viking, 2024
200 pages (Don’t @ me. Page numbers start at 7 and end at 207)