The narrator is a college senior, a good wrestler on a not-very-good small-school team. I really wanted to like it, but something about it left me completely cold for reasons I don't seem to be able to pin down. I am really struggling to articulate my feelings about this book. I absolutely can not wait to see where Habash goes with a second book.Morning News Tournament of Books #111 Read more Sentence level perfection right here, which can not be denied no matter the topic or subject matter. But this is Stephen's purpose and life force on the page so it's understandable why it's on the page. I was a bit tired of all the technical wrestling bits by the end, not quite visualizing what is happening since I don't know wrestling. Habash that this story is so captivating.
But it is a testament to the writing skill of Mr. Would I usually care for a book about a deranged college student obsessed with wrestling? Or even books about sports or college at all? Absolutely not. Running around the streets in a gorilla mask! The writing is gutsy in other ways - listing all 99 names of the wrestlers that Stephen has lost matches to.
Stephen is okay but he is such a weirdo! Other characters call him a weirdo! He proceeds to beat them with a shoe. I never really have a problem with unlikable characters unless they are deliberately sociopathic murderers or something. We have Stephen Florida - not the most likeable dude, in his final year of college, when most of his relatives have recently died and his main focus is the sport of wrestling! Even the topic of wrestling should scare most readers away, if Stephen won't do it himself. But Gabe Habash goes all in with this first book. Maybe save the gutsy for a second book, when you have another example of your writing and style in a first book, to compare the second book to.
In my mind, I would think that a first time writer would not want to be so gutsy when they don't have anything else published.
I must say, I can really admire a first novel when it is very very gutsy.
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