Women's boxing deserved a heroic novel like this one.

Here is a heroic novel. Because it is bold and electrifying, and because it elevates these poor girls to the status of heroines, who, in the hands of any other writer, would be little more than supporting characters. What another writer would have resolved with a sordid, dirty, and dark portrait of unfortunate women who have found a way out in boxing, a young debutante named Rita Bullwinkel (California, 1988) has decided to narrate as an epic legend, a mythical tale with female protagonists fighting for a place where they can exist. Enough with pantheons of male athletes with perfect bodies: make room for the muscular curves of the female boxers of Reno, Nevada.

The eight girls hiding beneath these goddesses are under eighteen years old and participate in the Daughters of America Cup, an annual tournament held in a dusty sports complex lost in the middle of the United States. The female boxers face off in a boxing ring with four pairs on each side, until the grand finale, which only two can reach. Each chapter narrates one of these fights, always lasting eight rounds: we witness the blows, jumps, blood splashes, and spurts of saliva that occur in any boxing match, but—and this is where the novel begins to elevate—each fight also serves as the stage for the fighters' past and future.

A privileged observatory

Thanks to an omniscient and clairvoyant narrator, we discover where they come from and where they will go, what each of these girls' lives will be like: which ones will end up behind a counter, which ones will have families and which ones won't, when they will die and what exactly they will be thinking at the moment of their death, as well as what they are thinking just before. We enter the mind of each of them and jump back and forth along the thread of their lives. And we discover it, moreover, in fits and starts, short paragraphs written in clean and direct prose, like a good punch, but also full of small images and metaphors that attempt to turn boxing into a kind of ritual dance that transcends the violent sport that it remains. The light that filters through the pavilion's windows is a waterfall of gold, for example, and the lives of each of the girls are visually reproduced on discs that are placed one on top of the other.

But Bullwinkel doesn't just make it beautiful. She wanted to write about the folds of time and destiny, and about what it means to forge a path in life or have one's own style: "It's not that that makes them different. It's the world each one has built to cloister themselves in." She has given us readers a privileged vantage point: that of someone who contemplates a person with much more information about them than they could ever possibly possess. And this is very empowering. Every time she explains a significant episode in the girls' lives, it's as if she's stripping them naked and we end up before eight female bodies who only have themselves to prove to the world that they're worth it. They can only grit their teeth and fight as hard as they can to get out, because, as happens inside the pavilion in Reno, Nevada, no one will help them, no one will look at them. They are poor and they are women, and they fight as much among themselves as against the world they are about to disembark in.