Today’s matchup sees the debut novel from Kelly Link 
who’s been publishing short fiction for years against a novel in stories by Rita Bullwinkel, the current fiction editor of McSweeney’s.
Headshot has gotten a lot of love and after a couple of podcast interviews, this book fell on my radar even before the Tournament of Books. Bullwinkel takes an interesting tack, structuring the book around a teen girls’ boxing tournament. Bullwinkel is deft, but I have to confess to an antipathy towards sports novels that worked against this book in my estimation,
Kelly Link in The Book of Love, on the other hand, creates a magical world that includes a central mystery of how the primary characters happened to somehow die but were brought back to life by their high school music teacher, at the same time erasing all memory of their death and absence for a year. There’s conflict between godlike beings, the resurrected individuals being asked to perform magic with no instruction on how to do so. A great deal of what’s going on is left unexplained as the story goes on although in the end, perhaps too much is explained.
Overall, I felt that Kelly Link’s book was the superior of the two.
My judgment on the judgment
I opened Hannah Bonner’s verdict figuring it was a coin toss whether we’d agree, and given how much I’ve seen online raving about Headshot maybe even a likelihood that she’d go with Bullwinkel and so it was no surprise when she did. I can understand her arguments for Headshot even if I disagree with them. I was deeply immersed in the book in a way that she was not.
Leave a Reply