Book #72 of 2022:We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan BarryThis novel is told from the first-person plural pe

Book #72 of 2022:

We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry

This novel is told from the first-person plural perspective of a 1989 high school girls field hockey team, sometimes narrowing in on one specific member or another but generally seeming to come from the generalized collective, a la “we shivered at the prospects of this, some of us shivering with excitement and most of us shivering with dread.” That’s a striking stylistic choice that well fits the tale of these Salem teens taking oaths and making sacrifices to bind themselves to dark forces in order to gain confidence and win more of their games. The book also keeps somewhat coy about whether those rituals are ultimately real or not, caring more about how the would-be coven experiences them than if any demonic influence actually exists.

I’m on board with nearly all of that, and I think this story is a great illustration of just how weird and wild teenagers can be when investing totems with in-group meaning. It’s a good representation of queerness without the constriction of labels, too. At the same time, however, I can’t help complaining as a reader that there’s basically no plot here: no stakes, no dangers, no particular objectives, no narrative structure, and no character growth. Should we be worried about these kids and the powers they might be unleashing? The text doesn’t suggest that outright. Instead we simply hear matter-of-fact reporting of one thing they do and then the next, again and again and again.

Not all of the experimental elements work for me either, like one player’s fringe of hair being anthropomorphized throughout with a personality and a name. And I never quite feel as though author Quan Barry reconciles the supposed legacy of local witchcraft with the acknowledged truth that those people executed in the seventeenth-century were innocent of the wicked charges laid against them — far more innocent than the writer’s protagonists, in fact.

I do like the prose and the basic idea behind this title, but it just seems like there are some significant pieces missing from it as a finished product.

[Content warning for gaslighting, rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
–Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog