More Like Wrestling
A Novel
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing . . .
More Like Wrestling is the magnificent debut novel by one of the most acclaimed music journalists of her generation. It tells the story of Pinch and Paige, two sisters coming of age in Oakland, California, in the 1980s, a time when that beautiful, crumbling city is being transformed by tectonic shifts, both literal and figurative.
The novel unfolds through the alternating narration of the two sisters: Pinch, quiet and observant, and Paige, louder and wilder but faltering under her facade. The sisters are teenage refugees from a violent home, living alone in a faded Victorian mansion where they survive by creating a closed world centered around each other and their new friends—a rowdy makeshift family of castoffs, dealers, and drama queens on the periphery of the burgeoning drug game, some looking for a way out, some looking for a way deeper in. As the sisters grow from girls into women, they are confronted with a series of surprising reversals—death, imprisonment, and, just maybe, love—that force them to come to grips with the truth about their choices, their friends, and their tangled roots.
More Like Wrestling takes readers into fresh and surprising terrain, bringing a complex set of characters to vivid life with bracing honesty and sophistication. With a journalist’s eye for detail and a poet’s ear for language, Danyel Smith has written an unforgettable tale about memory, forgiveness, and love in a world built on fault lines.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two sisters grow up on their own in Oakland in the 1980s in this rich, idiosyncratic, impressionistic first novel. Smart, stubborn Paige and her silent little sister, Pinch, enjoy an idyllic if lopsided childhood as children of a single mother, with visits to the library, ballet lessons and Black Panther day care. But when Paige is 14 and Pinch is 12, their mother's boyfriend attacks Paige in public, and Paige persuades their mother to rent the girls their own apartment. Making house for each other, they begin to attract a circle of friends: Maynard, Donnell and LaNell, Teeara, Oscar. Through high school it is all (or mostly) innocent, just microwave dinners together and trips to Mexicali Rose for burritos. Then the boys begin to have more money too much money. Paige's best friend, Maynard, marries an uptown girl named Jess and has a baby; Paige drops out of college and starts dating Oscar. Oscar and Maynard begin dealing drugs; then Jess is shot and killed, and Paige thinks she knows who's responsible. Fiercely independent and sharp as she has always seemed, she begins to lose her bearings and lean on Pinch, who is still quiet but surprisingly resilient. There is no stereotyping here Smith's characters are decent human beings living in a world where selling crack can seem like a regular job, but where redemption is always possible. The novel's underlying optimism may strike readers as unrealistic at times, but the lovingly detailed evocation of Oakland ("southern negro mores and shiny liberal whiteness and slow-motion port and fifty-cent tacos") and Smith's lyrical if sometimes rocky prose make this a substantial and strikingly original debut.
