Twenty Miles pulls familiar heartstrings for hockey lovers – and for everyone

At first, I didn't think I could write this review: conflict of interest. There are times I slip into my trainers, pull a sweater on, heave hockey equipment over my shoulder and head for the rink, and it's laboured, a struggle. I see maybe too much of myself in Isabel (Iz), the protagonist of Twenty Miles – trying to connect, find hope, find a reason in a game. Sometimes I know the game is in my blood, where it has always been, and it roils beneath the surface; sometimes it's lost there, though, hiding inside the marrow, and I need to set myself looking for it.

This search, Iz's search for her reason, herself, through hockey, makes up the core of the novel. When she arrives at Winnipeg University to play for the Scarlets, she is swallowed by her new life: practices and games, music and banter and nicknames slung around the dressing room, pitchers of beer, and, largely, the ghost of her father, Kristjan, a former hockey star now deceased. He lives through her hands, his legacy, that instinctively move pucks down the ice, and through expectations – that she will live in his image, fulfill opportunities he never had, play as he played now that he is gone. The more she learns, the more she gets lost, and before her teammates can proclaim, 'we found Iz,' she must find herself again.

The prose of Twenty Miles rattles along quick, staccato, almost conversational, and changes in setting sometimes come so quickly that they're disorienting. The rare Canadian who didn't grow up with the game may wish for a glossary to navigate around dekes and poke-checks, the hockey vernacular.

Overall, the novel manages to explore common subjects of heartbreaking loss and redeeming discovery without falling into over-sentimentality. As Hedley writes, 'a hockey game is the same story told over and over again. Shift the plot around, switch the characters, change the ending a bit, but it's still the same and we already know how it will end.' In this way, the novel is like the game itself. When the ending comes, it's not a surprise, but it's a familiar release, like the exhale at the buzzer's final sound.