Canadian Literature admires Twenty Miles
In Twenty Miles, Cara Hedley’s narrator, Isabel Norris (Iz), must … transcend the ghost of her father, a hockey star who died at eighteen, leaving her to be raised by her paternal grandparents. Interpolated with third-person passages from the grandmother’s point of view, Iz’s first-person narrative unfolds chronologically with few flashbacks. The past, however, constantly pulls at the present: Isabel’s grandparents started her in hockey to continue their late son’s legacy, and Iz now plays for Winnipeg University’s hockey team. The appeal of the game itself comes across very clearly:
‘The hockey itself was the easy part: hands remembering the story, legs revising, improvising, that self-renewing drama unfolding in the white space beneath though, the hard-breath moments when your brain forgets itself and the hands take over.’
Even more engaging are the finely-drawn portraits of the other women hockey players. Their raunchy colloquialisms and sadistic antics will surprise anyone who assumes that only male jocks revel in scatological humour, public urination, and hazing rituals involving beer bongs … lyrical writing style … great originality and impact
