Book Review: We Ride Upon Sticks

We Ride Upon Sticks
Quan Barry
Pantheon, 2020
ISBN: 9781524748098

What do you get when Dazed and Confused meets Stranger Things? How about when The Crucible and Macbeth challenge the Bad News Bears and The Craft to a game of field hockey? Put all of those things together, plop them down on the middle of a pitch in the same town that hosted the infamous witchcraft trials in 1692, hand the referee’s whistle to Emilio Estevez and you get We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry.

It’s a daunting combination, but don’t worry, Barry ties everything together and does so in surprising, satisfying, and hilarious fashion. 

The 1989 Danvers High School girls’ field hockey team is an endearing and entertaining bunch. Unfortunately for them that hasn’t helped them win too many field hockey games together. That all changes when the Falcons attend a pre-season summer camp and Mel Boucher, the team’s goalie (because it’s always the goalie) signs a dark magic pledge in a spiral bound notebook with Emilio Estevez on the cover. Each player on the Falcons signs as well and is given a torn strip of blue tube sock to tie around their arm as a symbol to their collective witchery. Mayhem and a historic winning streak promptly ensue.

The magic propelling the Falcons to new heights isn’t the only sorcery at play in these pages. In a dense and acutely detailed story containing stories on top of stories, Barry guides the reader gently, yet firmly, and sometimes a little slowly, through the lives and realities of each one of the girls (and the one boy on the team, too) who make up this team/coven.

Every player is developed with a rich and thorough back story. Tackling together personal struggles like racial identity, gender norms, sexual desires and shame, and the overall struggle of just being a human in the 1980s. The diligent details of so many parallel backstories at times come at the sacrifice of the pacing of the novel, but Barry is excellent at letting dramatic tension slowly percolate in the background that it kept me turning the pages eager to soak up every piece of information of each Falcon and how they move through the world. 

We Ride Upon Sticks is also a master class in Point of View as a clever, sardonic, and omniscient narrator speaks for the team as one. A voice equally calculating as it is intoxicating.

We don’t spend a ton of time on the field hockey pitch because we don’t need to. Former high school athletes know well the stories of what takes place on the field often pale in comparison to the ones taking place before practice, after practice, on the bus rides, at the parties, or in this case, the woods conducting sacrificial rituals. 

Barry constructs the Falcons as a likable, easy-to-root-for underdog, but not in a campy, Disney sports movie sort of way. The players are all wry, raw, messy, and flawed. All of them devout to Emilio, the official harbinger of dark spirits at play. This is not sports fiction so much as it is fiction in conversation with a sport as the vehicle to help us find our place in the world, what we’re searching for, and the support and camaraderie that can only be forged in a high school locker room (or a coven).