Sometimes, art is annoying. It's not a crime, nor is it indicative of a creative's skill. The qualities which make it annoying may even be intentional. Yet, whenever a work is annoying and celebrated despite that because it's still well-crafted, I can't help but grit my teeth a bit. Headshot by Rita Bulwinkel is a novel covering the boxing matches of 8 young teenage girls who have all traveled to this tournament for their own, complex reasons. I really enjoyed this cast and their unconventional viewpoints. What I didn't enjoy was how often their names were used. This novel in its physical form is 224 pages, most of the girls' matches being about 30-40 pages; each of the girls in this tournament have their names repeated over 100 times, again and again until you actively hate their name and never wanna hear it again. Rachel Doricko, Kate Heffer, Iggy OR Izzy Lang, are names I never wanna hear ever again, and never as much as I heard them through this audiobook.

I'm sure the repetition is likely to mimick some of the commentary during recorded matches or for some other valid, artistic reason. But this book was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Fiction, and on the longlist for the Booker Prize. Why do we still celebrate works that engage in mind-numbing irritation, all because they're crafted by someone with clear talent?

Reading this book made me very happy even while I was actively groaning at whatever happened next. There are so many tales within fantasy that begin just like Sciona's, where we have a woman who has many claims to privilege save for wealth wealth enter a male-dominated field and is proven to be the most brilliant, talented person the upper echelons of academia have ever seen. She's an underdog, faces all the challenges one would expect when surrounded by privileged, evil men, and prevails against them all.

What makes Sciona, and thereby this tale, far more interesting is that, like all the protagonists in these fantasy novels, she's given a sidekick of a marginalized, oppressed ethnicity. Except, he's not a sidekick at all. His name is Thomil, and instead of approaching him with the full respect and treatment of an equal, she treats him like shit, because despite being marginalized due to her gender, Sciona has been raised with all the bigotry that every common person in her society has. It's an aspect of her worldview that gets challenged constantly throughout the novel, and she struggles to grasp what it means to decenter oneself. These are the subversions and critiques I love in fantasy, particularly when they are difficult to glamorize.

Finishing this novel, I'm left a little embittered by this. Not because it's unnecessary, but because I'm unsure if this deconstruction of the white savior has anything constructive to say, truly. We never get a foil to Sciona's approach to allyship, and I personally would've appreciated it, especially considering this story's ending.

I love this premise, what this story is trying to say, the gorgeous writing, the magic system, the world. It just barely missed its mark for me.