Bookslut is crazy about Twenty Miles

Now onto fiction, where Twenty Miles by Cara Hedley is one of those incredibly rare stories actually about women and sports. It’s a not a “girl loves a ballplayer” book but a “girl who plays ice hockey (yeah!) at the collegiate level” novel. It’s about joining a team of people who are very good at what they do, and even more so incredibly, almost maniacally, committed to it. It’s also about all the crazy things that happen when you are part of a sports team: the attitudes, the competition, the jokes and occasionally the evenings of debauchery. More than anything though, Twenty Miles is about being a serious jock, something I never thought I was going to find in a book about teenage girls, and I am so happy about it now that I can hardly stand it.

What’s especially great here is Isabel, a Winnipeg University freshman who is invited to tryout for the Scarlets. Isabel’s father was a minor hockey legend who died impossibly young. She skates like him, handles the puck like him, and for her grandmother who raised her, she has always lived up to his legacy. At Winnipeg, Isabel plays with other girls for the first time in her life (there were no girls' teams in her hometown) and finds herself overwhelmed at times by the sheer force of their collective natures. Hedley, who played college hockey herself, clearly has the locker room banter nailed and revels in showing the girls with their rowdy natures running unchecked. Through her teammates, Isabel views a huge love of hockey that she is not sure she shares, and so she begins to question her commitment to the sport that was thrust upon her at such a young age. The issue of whether she should keep playing sends her home to the place where her father’s ghost still lives. Embracing who he really was, and who she is, becomes the challenge for Isabel, and lifts Twenty Miles into the realm of solid coming-of-age drama, yet with a setting and plot unlike any other.

This book is strong, it’s powerful, and it celebrates love of game, friends, family and cute classmates. The girls are incredibly bold and utterly fearless, and so is Hedley. She pointedly drops a nice little GBLT subplot into the mix when two members of the team are discovered to have fallen for each other, and loudly and unabashedly celebrated in a very sweet and funny moment. Ultimately, Twenty Miles is all about the good in the world of sport and college, and is an excellent title for all the girls who play, love and laugh as hard as they possibly can.