by Jessie Kinivan
“He looked happy and sad at the same time. That’s a popular adult look because adults are busy and have to do everything at once, even feel things.”
Fight Night follows three generations of women; our narrator Swiv, who is ‘around a hundred months old’, her mother, and her grandmother Elvira. The stubborn and anxious Swiv has been suspended from school for enacting Elvira’s lessons in fighting back, and so spends her time with her grandmother, shopping, watching basketball games and attending weekly ‘editorial meetings’.
As her heavily pregnant mother, an actress with a flair for the dramatic (as well as visible PTSD) waits to give birth, Swiv is assigned the task of documenting their lives for her absent father, noting down the domestic routines that tell a far bigger story, in a way that only a child can. When Elvira books a spontaneous trip to California, it is up to Swiv to keep her boisterous grandmother safe, and as the two navigate travel from Canada together, their blend of stern naivete and jovial wisdom make for a delightfully odd duo – one you would always want to be seated next to on a flight.
Swiv’s blunt observations and honest empathy bring to mind Scout Finch, and the love she has for the women in her life, all so different, yet bonded by the same grit and heart, determined to fight for the right to live life on their own terms, is spectacular.
Full of brilliant lines that are both riotously funny and deeply moving (I stopped highlighting sentences early in when the book started to resemble a colouring book) it is a paean to mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers. All three women are irrepressible, staunchly loyal and filled with charm and empathy. They guard themselves, and each other, with a fighting spirit that cuts through the novel’s darker edges and leaves the reader emboldened and hopeful.
Fight Night will break your heart (in all the right ways) and then immediately seek to heal you with its warmth and humour. I can’t recommend it enough.