bookgazing | 'Whip It' - Shauna Cross

Writing about ‘Whip It’(formerly ‘Derby Girl’) by Shauna Cross requires me to be two people, with two different sets of reactions. My critical brain and my personal reading brain don’t agree about this book at all and they are both shouting at me to tell their side of the story and only their side of the story. My critical brain says the parts of the book’s plot that revolved around friendship and romance were unoriginal, that it has issues with the resolution of the relationship between Bliss Cavendar and her mother and that the book could be kind of shallow in places, when it had a great opportunity for depth. My personal, readerly brain wants to shout about how much fun it is to ride with Bliss. It wants everyone to know that I read the book in two days because Bliss’s first person voice is hilariously scathing and captures the determined teenage passion of a girl caged by her parents. Please excuse the squabbling, while they each try to get their side represented and I try to stop one side from silencing the other with a brick.

Bliss Cavendar is stuck in the wrong life. She’s a punk rock rebel with blue hair, living small town Bodeen, most famous for its icecream. Her beauty pageant obsessed mother is determined Bliss will be crowned Miss Bluebonnet this year. Bliss works at the Oink Joint with her Arab-American best friend Pash, while they both dream about getting out of Bodeen forever.

On a trip to the big city (Austin) for clothes (mother approved clothes, or nothing) Bliss grabs a poster for a derby girl bout. After one match she’s obsessed and after a rocky, but fast try out she begins her illicit life as a shoving, jumping, costumed derby girl with the Hurl Scouts.

First let me address the fact that I had a definite set of expectations about what a roller derby novel would be concerned with. These expectations collided with the reality of ‘Whip It’ and probably caused me to feel like the book was not performing as well as it could have done, which is not entirely fair to the book that ‘Whip It’ actually was. At the most basic level I expected that a novel about roller derby would explain the main rules of the sport to the reader. I learnt plenty about the costuming of roller derby and I learnt what some of the more dangerous, advanced moves were called, like jumping the rail. However, I learnt very little about the rules of the sport and I still can’t picture you what the move the novel is named after (taking a whip off someone’s leg) might look like.

I also expected ‘Whip It’ to examine the idea of women in sport in depth. Roller derby seems to be a sport women have claimed as their own and male participants are in the minority. A female sports team seems the ideal conceit to structure an examination of how team dynamics are established among women (who are often taught that other women are the enemy) and how more isolationist forms of feminism, or ideas about female friendship and competitiveness play into the creation of a female team. Instead of creating a more complicated model of female acceptance, Cross has Bliss’s teammates accept her almost immediately, based on a mixture of her skating skills and what seems to be a natural inclination towards sisterhood. Having seen quite a few sporting films (with male and female characters) where being a good player doesn’t necessarily guarantee acceptance and knowing that being a girl (or for that matter, being a man) doesn’t always guarantee you automatic acceptance into a gendered group Bliss’s teammates attitudes seemed somewhat oddly realised to me. I’m not saying it’s an unrealistic situation, some groups of friends will quickly accept a newbie because they seem cool, some sports teams base their personal acceptance of a new player on their skill, but I would have liked some clarification about why the author felt Bliss would be accepted so quickly by a derby team. I suspect, knowing that the author is a former roller derby player herself, that she has inserted her own experience, without explaining the reasoning behind the other girls acceptance of a new player and that left me feeling like the book lacked a bit of internal explanation.

The fun of the sport seems to come not only from the competitive element, but from the aspect of violence roller derby includes rather playfully. The subversive derby costumes (another fun element of the novel) straddle an interesting line between being feminine, but also non-traditionally feminine. All this seems to provide any author with the opportunity to write a book that digs deep into a reconstructed idea of femininity. I thought that Bliss’s separate storyline, about having a mother who is determined that her punk rock daughter will become a beauty pageant winner, provided a chance for readers to think about traditional femininity’s opposition to divergent expressions of femininity, although that storyline doesn’t really examine the similarities between costuming as a derby girl and costuming as a pageant queen, just the surface differences between the two kinds of costume. Bliss’s first person voice gestures towards some ideas about femininity and how it can be co-opted into a subversion of itself (my doesn’t that sound pompous) like 'For instance there are girls who are so fierce that wearing pink makes them look that much cooler (especially when paired with black-and-white-striped tights or a skull choker). On those badass vixens, pink becomes an in-your-face dare...' but the storyline doesn’t really develop those ideas further. That’s ok, not every book needs to go deep into issues, it’s just that I was expecting a connected and coherent investigation running through the book that would really rip into these ideas.

I think the disappointment of some of my expectations relate to the quality of the book. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think a roller derby book should teach readers more about the sport. Overall I have been a little disappointed this month with how authors writing sporting books seem to avoid an attempt at naturally integrating explanations of rules and moves into their novels, so perhaps I should have mentioned this lack in other reviews. The other two expectations...well I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a roller derby novel to look at those ideas, but the fact that ‘Whip It’ decides to skim the surface of these ideas rather than deeply engaging with them doesn’t make ‘Whip It’ a flawed book, merely a different kind of book. So now let me turn to examining ‘Whip It’ on the kind of book it actually strives to be and whether it succeeds.

I think ‘Whip It’ is a book focused on increasing female empowerment, at least that’s my theory on why Bliss is taken so quickly to the heart of the team. Shauna Cross wants to show the female bonding aspect of roller derby, without real complication to provide a positive example of roller derby sisterhood. Considering the way Cross shows Bliss desert the sisterhood later, by failing her best friend Pash because Bliss is too busy with her new boyfriend I don’t think this entirely positive representation compromises the reality of the novel. Reality aside, do we not all like to read a novel where girls get to be friends without reservations and productive teammates? Does it not make us say ‘Hurray!’? I could talk a little bit about how I think Cross’s message of female empowerment is slightly limited, but this is already long and I do still think that girls will take away a big chunk of empowerment from ‘Whip It’.

Putting expectations aside ‘Whip It’ is a lot of fun. It’s a book that relies entirely on the fun, quirky, snarky voice of Bliss to interest the reader. If you don’t like Bliss’s way of expressing herself you won’t get on with this book at all, but if you do you’ll probably read it as fast and delightedly as I did (fyi I think those of you who didn’t enjoy Empress of the World might have problems with Bliss’ voice, she reminds me a lot of Katrina). I find it so difficult to describe this concept of a successful first person voice, I guess because perceiving a voice as successful voice rests so much on each reader’s individual ideas about authenticity, as well as their likes and dislikes. For me Bliss is the kind of teenage rebel I recognise from books I read when I was a teenager, she’s a brave, cool/nerd girl with internally created integrity, who still makes the romantic mistakes of a teenager who has never known popularity. It’s probably best if I give you a sample of her voice so you can decide for yourself whether you’d like her:

'On the cool-scale, there girls are a ten. On a good day I'm a two-point-seven. I feel like the sad mathlete awkwardly trying to infiltrate the cheerleader clique at lunch in every teen movie you wish you'd never seen (except you have, several times). And we all know these scenarios do not end well. Especially for the mathlete.' .

At times I felt like Bliss and Pash could be a little meaner than they needed to be to prove to themselves that they were worth more than the rest of their school:

'So, please Lisa, for the sake of all humanity, kindly shove your ass and your Band-aid-size panties back into your too-tight jeans, and we won't be forced to vomit on you....

And when, by fifth period, Lisa takes to wearing her rhinestone hoodie around her waist for extra butt coverage, victory is mine. I can now proceed to my locker in peace.' .

But as I mentioned last week if I was a teenage reader on the outside of school culture I’d probably respond differently. I remember taking the rebel character of my generations young adult books to my heart and urging them on at the expense of all the mean girls, extenuating circumstance be damned.

There were a few parts I wasn’t keen on that I’ll just breeze through. The romantic storyline is incredibly unoriginal and becomes almost moralistic. For me, the use of an 80s Christian rock shirt as a subtle symbol for giving up your virginity is what saved Cross’s message about not giving something away that you can’t get back from becoming a heavy handed tale of ‘woe my virginity it is lost to a liar’ and made it kind of hilarious:

'But if you insist on blithely ignoring the above wisdom, DO NOT GIVE HIM YOUR BELOVED STRYPER SHIRT. You will never see it again. Trust me. I had to learn the hard way. (And, hell, yes, it still hurts, but it does get better.)'

I also couldn’t quite believe that Bliss and her mother bonded so quickly because Bliss’s heart was broken. There were a lot of deep issues between them and their reconciliation seemed too easy. I don’t want to discount these weak plot elements, but I do personally prize voice, so while these things bugged me I read this book in a two day blur of slightly giddy enjoyment because of Bliss’s voice.

If your expectations for this book sound similar to mine then you might need to readjust them to enjoy ‘Whip It’ (or ‘Whip It’ might just not be the book for you). Later this week I’ll be reviewing ‘Twenty Miles’ and while that’s about a female ice hockey team, it satisfied a lot of what I wanted and expected from ‘Whip It’. Otherwise ‘Whip It’ has a lot of fast fun to offer.