It seems that field hockey is really having a moment in 2020 fiction. I recently read Siobhan Vivian’s new YA novel, WE ARE THE WILDCATS, about a field hockey team and their manipulative coach. And now I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing Quan Barry’s WE RIDE UPON STICKS, a very different book that’s also about a field hockey team.

Historically, the Danvers Falcons have not been a very good field hockey team. But the incoming senior class is determined to change that. Near the end of summer training camp, they invoke the spirits of witchcraft…and their senior season will never be the same. Danvers, Massachusetts, has a rich history of this kind of thing; in fact, many of the events around the infamous Salem Witchcraft trials actually took place in Danvers, which at the time was known as Salem Village.

"Barry seems to especially relish her book’s chronological setting, and readers will too. WE RIDE UPON STICKS is infused with period details, many of which are incorporated in funny and inventive ways."

Now it’s the late 1980s, and the Lady Falcons are poised to flex their newly invoked powers both on and off the field. They are determined to perform and record bad deeds as part of the dark bargain they’ve struck --- and, much to their own surprise, they actually start winning.

Just as in the novel’s title, the narration uses a second person plural voice. The Falcons present themselves as a single, collective character, traveling together through one transformative season. After a couple of introductory chapters set the scene, each subsequent chapter focuses primarily on one of the team members (still using the plural pronoun “we” but commenting on the experience of one person), from a Vietnamese girl adopted by white parents (a former priest and nun, to boot), to a girl whose voluptuous body leads to assumptions about her sexuality, to the lone boy on the all-girls’ team. Each chapter is broadly structured around a field hockey game --- as the season progresses and the stakes steadily increase.

Barry seems to especially relish her book’s chronological setting, and readers will too. WE RIDE UPON STICKS is infused with period details, many of which are incorporated in funny and inventive ways. One character’s Aqua Net-heavy hairdo, nicknamed “The Claw,” takes on an actual personality of its own, for example, and the girls build the altar for their profane sacrifices on the image of Emilio Estevez.

But the novel’s setting is not merely frivolous, and although it is often laugh-out-loud funny, it also touches on pretty significant questions. What’s surprising and somewhat ironic given the plural narration is that WE RIDE UPON STICKS is largely about personal identity in terms of race, gender, sexuality and class privilege. Many of these issues might have gone largely unexamined or unacknowledged in the late 1980s vs. the early 2000s, which provides added richness both to Barry’s 1980s setting and its implicit commentary on all of these matters.

The final chapter brings the characters into adulthood and resolves many unanswered questions in a particularly satisfying closing scene.