i am no more than my size, and that size makes

me nothing and too much.

a paradox.

At the beginning of this verse novel, we meet Lily on her sixteenth birthday, picking herself off the floor after a bruising physical assault. At school, she is routinely humiliated for her size: meanwhile, her mother, Bernadette, ‘does not leave the house at all.

she taught me all about her shame

and left me alone with mine.

Both mother and daughter know she only has to get through one last year, and then she can leave the school behind. But is that the only way to be free? Isn’t there an alternative?

I’m somewhat surprised that, in less than twelve months of this blog, Gloves Off is the second novel about boxing that I’ve reviewed (the first, by Nikesh Shukla, is discussed here) and the third novel about sport. It’s the fourth, if you include my mention of Jason Reynolds’ Ghost. For a long time – right up into my late teens, if not longer – I saw myself firmly in the bookish camp (not to mention, the camp and bookish). I not only felt excluded from sporting activity, but bored by it and contemptuous of its participants. For many years, I would never have considered those two worlds becoming one, but what we’ve seen is the last year is a huge trend for sport-themed novels in children’s and YA fiction, including the Carnegie shortlist.

Moreover, I’ve enjoyed these novels. They are tales of self-determination and self-respect, but they are not bland tales of elite performance. Shukla’s novel puts the fighting spirit of his protagonist in a context of Far-Right violence and the psychology of victimisation: it’s as much about understanding the nature of confrontation as it is about physical change. Gloves Off is about feeling trapped by hatred internalised as self-loathing. I was reminded of the girls voted ugliest girls in school, in Clementine Beauvais’ joyful road-trip novel Piglettes, but Lily and her mother’s situation is past the point of escapism. In a world of men who enjoy their vulnerability, Lily must mine her strength and self-possessio out of herself.

This is a novel about ‘the business’ of becoming a young woman, as Lily sees it:

the work of growing up, of creating

yourself, the hatching and flourishing of

girls,

butterfly bright,

dragonfly gold.

It is also about love, which binds people in ways both destructive and empowering. Reid’s novel is less plotty than Shukla’s, but there is knotted complexity to the watchful, difficult, heartfelt mother-daughter relationship she depicts here, made vivid through the careful balance between their voices. Poetry, ostensibly a slow and meditative form, makes narrative as propulsive and immersive as a movie composed of headcam shots. Perhaps that’s why it has found a home in the field of Young Adult writing. You experience this novel intensely and intimately with its protagonists, and the sparing shifts between their voices make this in part an account of women studying one another for signs of hope, danger, and beauty.

I think this is why Tamsin Rosewell (bookseller extraordinaire of Kenilworth Books) recommended Gloves Off to me as a book with potential to cross audiences. Like the boxing gym, which Reid presents as a more liberating space than school, the verse of this novel is a space in which the voices of different generations and perspectives interact and combine. That is also, I think, a definition of great children’s literature – which bodes well for new publisher, Guppy Books, for whom this was a first and thrilling publication.

Gloves Off is currently available in hardback: Guppy Books publish it in paperback this March. You can order it from the publishers website and check out their upcoming titles; buy it from Waterstones via this link; or ask for it at your local independent bookshop (use ’em or lose ’em).