A spectator can choose a girl to support and stay with her until the end. Rita Bullwinkel makes that simple arrangement difficult. In Headshot, eight teenage boxers arrive in Reno, Nevada, for a two-day tournament. One will win. But a novel can spend time with the person on the other side of the ring, and once it has done that, cheering becomes a less comfortable business.
The venue is Bob’s Boxing Palace. The name promises more grandeur than the small audience supplies. This is not a spectacle made important by television coverage or a crowd’s approval. The girls bring the intensity themselves. For each of them, something that cannot be entered on a scorecard is at stake.
That difference between the tournament’s neatness and the fighters’ complicated attachments is the invitation here. The bracket needs to eliminate people. The reader does not have to.
Two girls, neither a supporting character
The authorized opening published by the Booker Prizes sets Artemis Victor against Andi Taylor. Artemis belongs to a successful boxing family; her sisters have already established what achievement looks like, and her parents are present. Andi has driven a long way alone. She carries a memory of a child’s drowning from her work as a lifeguard, a memory that does not stay outside the ropes.
It would be easy to distribute sympathy according to those circumstances. One girl has support, the other has made her own difficult journey. Bullwinkel lets us notice the inequality without making it the whole account. Artemis has also inherited a comparison. Being surrounded by people who believe you can succeed may leave remarkably little room to find out what success would mean to you.
Andi has to manage a more immediate interruption. Attention is part of her defense. When a memory returns, she cannot ask the other fighter to wait while she settles it. The need to keep her guard in place and the effort to stop thinking are entangled. This is a particularly concrete way of writing an intrusive thought: not simply as something distressing, but as something that interferes with what a body must do next.
The girls do not know each other as we begin to know them. They assess strength, appearance, reputation, possible weaknesses. Some of their private judgments are ungenerous. That matters. The novel does not make young women worthy of attention by first making them exemplary toward one another. Wanting to humiliate an opponent can coexist with being frightened, lonely, ambitious, or deserving of care.
Nor does explaining their circumstances make their circumstances interchangeable. The ring supplies the same immediate task, not the same resources or history. What changes is our willingness to let a quick assessment stand. The supposedly fortunate girl has a life beyond the advantage we have identified; the isolated girl has more to her than isolation.
There is a useful pressure in this opening for readers who do not follow boxing. We may not know how to evaluate every move, but we understand the difficulty of doing something urgent while thinking about something else. The sport makes that divided attention visible. Nobody gets an unlimited pause in which to understand herself before she acts.
The person you cannot look away from
A different encounter appears in BookBrowse’s authorized excerpt, which follows Rose Mueller and Tanya Maw. The movement of their hands brings childhood clapping games into the narration. It is a startling association, neither a cute decoration nor a claim that being punched is harmless play.
Both activities depend on another person’s timing. To respond well, you have to notice what her hands are doing and anticipate where they will be. A private store of childhood rhythms enters a much harsher exchange. The body remembers more than its formal training.
The connection makes an opponent look different. She is the person you must resist, but also the person you must attend to with unusual precision. In ordinary conversation, you can glance away or miss an expression without immediate consequences. Here, failing to notice may hurt. Their concentration draws them together at the very moment they are trying to defeat one another.
Calling this friendship would smooth out too much. They do not have to like each other for the exchange to become intimate. Nor does intimacy redeem the violence. It names the unsettling proximity of two people who are changing their actions because of each other, second by second.
Kate Preziosi’s review in The Brooklyn Rail draws attention to this connection between competition and closeness. It is a helpful way into a novel whose most interesting observations may happen between the moments a sports report would record. A report can tell us that a punch landed. Fiction can linger over what the two people were watching, imagining, or remembering before it did.
The adults remain nearby, but their authority does not give them complete access. In the opening, familiar coaching language can become little more than background sound. Advice is being issued; whether it reaches the fighter is another matter. The gap does not prove that experience is incommunicable. It shows why the nearest official explanation may still miss what is most urgent to the person acting.
For a girl whose body is often evaluated from the outside, this emphasis also changes the question. What can the body accomplish? How does it balance, withstand impact, make distance, or close it? Appearance has not ceased to matter to these characters. It has ceased to be the only available description of being embodied.
A clock inside a much longer life
The competition lasts two days, but Bullwinkel’s narration does not obey that boundary. It moves into the girls’ pasts and looks ahead into their adult lives. The publisher’s description establishes this wider temporal reach, and Bullwinkel explains its construction in her conversation with Jane Ciabattari at Literary Hub: the individual matches organize portraits, while the concrete tournament framework permits considerable freedom with time.
That framework is something to hold on to. However far a sentence travels, two girls are still facing each other. We can return to the bout without having to reconstruct the entire narrative situation.
The effect is not simply to reassure us that none of this will matter later. That would cheapen the effort in front of us. Rather, a moment can be enormous while someone lives it and acquire a different shape when remembered. A future does not erase the present’s intensity; it places that intensity within a life that continues.
This also changes what counts as suspense. We do not have to treat every glimpse ahead as an answer delivered too soon. A disclosed future can make us more curious about the person who has not yet reached it. The question becomes how this concentrated bodily experience belongs to a larger existence, not only which result will appear next.
Bullwinkel’s own sporting background helps explain the attention without turning the book into disguised reportage. In the same interview, she discusses youth athletics and watching unedited training videos made by young women. She was not a boxer herself. The tournament and gym are inventions, shaped to let her explore how competitive effort feels.
A rhythm worth trying before you commit
The two excerpts offer a useful test of the prose. Full names recur, thoughts move between fighters, and action alternates with temporal expansion. Repetition can make a name feel insistently present: this person, again, not just the one who must lose for someone else to advance. It can also make the machinery audible.
That is a real reservation, not merely a failure to appreciate unconventional sports fiction. Sara Batkie, writing in the Chicago Review of Books, praises the detail and compassion while finding the bracket and repeated full names occasionally schematic. Preziosi likewise notes uneven depth among the characters and the initial difficulty of navigating rapid changes of mind and time. Those objections are useful company for the enthusiastic response.
A reader seeking a single athlete’s steadily ascending story may therefore need to adjust expectations. This novel’s design keeps moving the center. Getting attached is not a mistake, but the next encounter may oblige you to take another attachment seriously.
The smallness of the audience is a good image to carry into that reading. It offers no guarantee that the girls’ effort will be recognized beyond the room. Yet the intensity does not need a grander setting to become legible. A place that matters little to the outside world can still hold an experience someone will measure other experiences against.
Winning remains desirable. There is no need to pretend otherwise in order to care about the losers. The bracket can tell us who is still in the competition; it cannot settle whose story we are ready to leave behind.