The 1989 Danvers High School Falcons field hockey team, Massachusetts, taps into something of the same powers that animated the Salem witchcraft accusations some 300 years previously and finds not only success on the hockey field beyond their wildest imaginings - all the way to States - but also, more importantly, their own fullest selves beyond the strictures of patriarchal (heteronormative, white-supremacist) control.
Proudly we pimp walked back to our beachhead. The football team watched us roll by. Even through their helmets you could hear them sniggering, though on a lower frequency you could smell their teen-boy fear. We laughed in return because it was obvious their own coaches were getting ideas and that they'd all be running Deering Stadium sooner or later.
Eleven girls-to-young-women (ages 17 to 18) making up the team, narrating in the first-person plural of "we" - Mel Boucher, Sue Yoon, Julie Kaling, Heather Houston, Little Smitty, Becca Bjelica, Boy Cory, Jen Fiorenza (and the Claw), AJ Johnson, Abby Putnam and Girl Cory - and all given equal prominence, which is done with an impressive ability to bring them all to life beyond the one or two traits that most strikingly signals each of them.
We ran off the field like a bunch of frenzied maenads carrying aloft the head of some poor slob that we'd recently torn off his shoulders. When Little Smitty got home to Smith Farm, she was still so pumped, she reached over and punched her dad when he asked how her day had gone.
It doesn't make for the strongest narrative drive, though there's some intrigue arising from the heavy foreshadowing, along with the basic sports narrative arising from their progressing from game to fame and, later, the investigations of intrepid student reporter Nicky the Chin which threaten to reveal all - but ultimately We Ride Upon Sticks is more about horizontal texture (also writ large in the loving 80s detritus scattered throughout) than forward momentum ... other than the strong feminist drive towards self-realisation, taking a different and differently intersectional form for each team member, including a nice pay-off with the final sections 30-years fast forward.
We should have loved her back, openly and without apology, but between the teen heart and the teen brain, only so much gets done.
Among other things, Barry is a poet and it shows - again, impressively - in the close control of language and in the absence of any floweriness or overt reliance on showy cadence and rhythm, in a voice that serves her story well. Plus - it's a bonus, but also integral to what makes the novel a success - it's funny.
Just as the two reporters turned and started walking away, the Claw screamed, We're red freaking hot!
Charlie Houlihan stopped in his tracks. "What'd you say?" he said.
"Nothing," said Jen Fiorenza, soothingly patting her hair the way one might try to calm an overly excited lapdog, her head in profile same as Lincoln's on the penny.
