I finished this tonight after reading it in bits and pieces over the last week or so! I am VERY tentatively using my horror tag on this because it really isn't horror in any meaningful sense, but I imagine it would be pleasant reading during the fall season because there's a ton of Salem/witch/spooky ambiance.

This is a breezy, funny, very readable comedy/absurdist magical realism/coming-of-age book about a girls' hockey team in Massachusetts (Salem area) in the 1980s who sell their souls to the devil (or more accurately to Emilio Estevez, kept by one of the girls in the sort of celebrity binder shrine that almost everybody had in the '80s) to win the state championship. I almost put it down a number of times in the first few chapters due to an almost complete lack of interest in either high school sports or the minutiae of life as a suburban teenager, in the 80s or otherwise. But the voice is strong enough to carry it - I think it says a lot that I was pretty thoroughly hooked despite finding almost everything about the actual subject matter very much not my thing.

It's just very intensely itself. This book absolutely commits. It wasn't always what I wanted, but I deeply admire its commitment to being the incredibly unique thing that it is, and in the end I liked what it was.

We Ride Upon Sticks has the extremely unusual narrative voice of first person plural ("we"), with no specific individual team member narrating, but rather a general sense that the narration is by the team as a whole entity ("we did this that summer"), switching in and out of all of their individual POVs as we get a feel for the individual lives of 11 different characters. It works without being confusing even before this central spoiler of the book: Which is that the girls gradually become an actual hive mind as they commit ever deeper to their dedication to Emilio/the devil with small rituals and sacrifices cobbled together from sneakily reading books in the "teacher's permission only" section of the school library.

I think it gives you a pretty accurate idea of the book's general style (in addition to selling their souls to Emilio Estevez) that one girl's bouffant 80s hairdo is referred to as The Claw, has its own narration, and gives the others orders, and it's entirely unclear (in most cases, anyway) whether this is actually happening and whether anyone else can hear it, but it's exactly on par with other weirdness of the "being a teenager is just strange, man" variety such as locker vandalism, parental shenanigans, and the ongoing question of whether one of the adult coaches is having an affair with one of the kids or if this is just the result of the teenage gossip mill acting out for shock value.

One thing I did truly like is that the book skipped past a lot of low-hanging narrative fruit about teenagehood, especially since all 11 of the team members are given equal weight in the narrative: the kids aren't relentlessly bullied, although bullies and cliques are obviously present in their lives; their home lives are weird and complicated but neither idyllic nor miserable; the two Asian kids, one Black kid, and multiple queer kids in the group all have their own things going on. The team members' triumphs and their tragedies are the kinds of petty things that happen in high school, have all the meaning in the world to them at the time, and may or may not matter that much later on.

In light of that, I had mixed feelings about a major aspect of where the book turned out to be going: The book in large and small ways clearly throws out signals that it's building towards dire events - which almost never actually happen. Nothing terrible happens at the prom, burying a dead rabbit on the field to win a game is weighted with dire significance but really does just win them that game (as well as coming back to bite them in an ordinary way much later), significance-freighted events such as pestilence in the 4H barn and one girl's younger brother's invisible head lice are really just the ordinary small disasters of childhood and not (in any clear way) Emilio-related or building up to anything apocalyptic. The big game goes off without any cursed shenanigans, the girls' biggest personal disasters are either self-inflicted or come about as the result of typical teenage failure to read social cues from the people around them, and their increasing series of chaotic-neutral-tending-chaotic-evil actions to get in Emilio's good graces (from vandalizing cars to flashing teachers to setting things on fire and holding people at gunpoint) turn out to be something that, in the end, they simply grow out of at the end of senior year.

I have mixed feelings about this because it does eventually end up feeling like an ongoing series of anticlimaxes when the narrative cues are pointing to one thing and then the book just doesn't go there. But at the same time, it really enhances the feeling of the book being - ultimately - about ordinary teenagehood and most of the girls' actions being their own decisions, not something they're driven to by a higher force, even if there are times when there's evidently something magical mucking around with their lives.

And I found myself unexpectedly verklempt (considering that I never really connected all that strongly with any of the girls as individual characters) by how much I cared about, first of all, their flash-forward to the present day at the end of the book in which they're all doing fine and living very different but individually fulfilling lives (whether it's as a mother of seven or a marketer of high-end organic smoothies), and second, the reveal that what got them out of an escalating series of acting-out-for-Emilio petty crimes was, simply, deciding not to do it anymore - which really is what being a teenager is sometimes like.


p.s. You can read another review of the book at Skygiants' DW, which is where I heard about it. (Contains spoilers.)