We Ride Upon Sticks

dnf @ 13% / ~50 pages

TRAGICALLY, i don't think this book is for me. there's nothing wrong with it, i just don't get along well with the writing so i'd rather put it down now. definitely still recommend y'all pick this up if you're interested!

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mallory o'meara called this “the most truly New England book I've ever read” so now i must read it.

Read for Massachusetts Center for the book 2023 reading challenge - February: A book set in your home town/ city or state.

Interesting plot and setting- but lost me as the book wandered on. I lost track of the characters and where the plot was going about midway through the book. I did like how it wrapped up at the end.

I never think that books revolving around sports are going to be fun for me, but this was really FUN. The ending was a little anti-climactic, but the characters were well-drawn, teen girls behaving badly, against the backdrop of the Danvers High School field hockey 1989 season, and the Salem witch trials having happened just up the road. The audiobook was excellent.

Stacks of Strange Book Club Pick - April

I honestly don't know what to rate this because I don't have any really strong feeling, but I did enjoy reading it and the ✨80's vibes✨

3.5 stars rounded up. This was a fun read, although I did keep forgetting who was who with the large amount of characters, but I don't think it really made a difference. I think the premise was good, but I don't think the plot stuck to the premise very closely and I wish it would have brought in more of the witchiness. The conclusion was a bit of a jolt to the system, I was thinking I had accidentally skipped some pages and missed something, but it came back around in the end. I am trying not to spoil anything so this is a pretty vague review, but I liked the book and would read more from the author although I wouldn't necessarily recommend this book to most people.

A dark comedy about a girls' field hockey team that dabbles in witchcraft to win the state championship, guided by the spirit of Emilio Estevez? Yes, please. This book is deeply satisfying on several levels: crisply written, with humor dry as dust, packed with detail but no ends loose. Beautiful character development, sex positive and affirming, clever and full of humanity. A love letter to the people on your team in life.

Wondrously strange and frequently hilarious. The first person plural omniscient narrator is a risky venture (although it was used successfully in one of my favorite books of all time, [b:Then We Came to the End 97782 Then We Came to the End Joshua Ferris https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442800496l/97782.SY75.jpg 2926759]). It provides a sweeping view of the story but keeps the reader from feeling connected to any one character. But in this case the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and each of the Danvers varsity field hockey players contributes to the portrait of late 1980s girlhood, including sentient hair bangs, tenuous explorations of the adults they want to be, sexual confusion, and the transformation from a losing team to fierce contenders for state championship. Were the girls really practicing witchcraft or were they just full of team spirit? Were the girls who accused scores of innocent people in 1692 Salem really possessed or were they expressing their power the only way they knew how? The connection is a little suspect (The hockey team's hijinks lead to some property damage and petty larceny, not to anyone being hanged), but Quan Barry goes there anyway, with a little help from a high school production of Arthur Miler's The Crucible.Highly recommended if you are looking for something just a little bit different, and a blast from the past that is welcome relief from this dismal present.

This was a lot of fun, for an adult book. I know that sounds like a backhanded compliment but it's...well, maybe it is. It reads like a YA urban fantasy book but with more ~literary~ writing. Very sharp and fun, with bonus for local Boston North Shore references. Also, a good and thoughtful use of an 80s setting and reference unlike SOME books that think a simple list of references to things of the 80s is enough to hold a book together, coughErnest Clinecough

This book was SO GREAT! It has amazing characters - yes, including the Claw and le Splotch! - and Barry does such a great job of capturing so many different teenage girl experiences. Plus, it's hilarious and still thought-provoking at the same time. I loved everyone.

Wow. What started out as a book I thought I would DNF because...well...sports. Turned out to be one of the best explorations of friendship and identity that I've ever read, and the final chapter is a chefs kiss of an epilogue.

Ok, this will not be everyone's cup of tea but DAMN was it mine! I love Barry's style. This is a character-driven novel with the most surprising and utterly intriguing cast of characters I've seen in a while. And it's written as a collective narrative. WHAT?! Mind blown. I'm not sure I've ever seen this pulled off so effectively in a novel.

This book was instantly appealing to me. First of all, I played field hockey in high school. Second of all, I went through a Salem history phase when I was younger. Put together field hockey and some general witchery? I'm in. That being said, this book was nothing like I expected and all the better for it.

Utterly original and often hilarious imagery is what I think made this book so special. One of my favorite examples: “The full Beaver Moon sat in the sky like a woman who'd just had a face-lift, the patient concealed behind a bandage of gauzy clouds”. Get out of here. I love that sentence so much, and the book is chock-full of sentences like that. Normally when I'm reading excessive similes and metaphors I start groaning internally. Not this time.

I don't even want to talk about the plot because I am just so damn ecstatic about how much I enjoyed the language, the structure, and the mic-dropping truths Barry lays out along the way sans blatant agenda pushing. This book's time period missed me by about two decades, so I didn't have the nostalgia factor of being a teenager in the late 80's. I think if you did have that experience, you might enjoy it even more. But even though some references went over my head, it didn't detract from a thoroughly enjoyable reading experience. HIGHLY recommend if you want something weird, different, and funny that will make you want to high five the English language. Field Field Field!

Something magical happened while I read this book. I would sit, I swear, for hours and read it. I loved every minute of it. But no matter how much I read, the Kindle percent never changed. I can't explain it, it's as if We Ride Upon Sticks was secretly a 1200 page book that says it's 384 pages. Anyway, that's why it seems like it took me a month to read it.
Sticks made me laugh out loud, cringe, feel nostalgic, and want to practice witchcraft, for a hot minute. This would have been amazing to listen to on audio, but I think I'm still way down on the hold's list for that format. It would make such a rad movie. I have to say that I never, not once, could guess where it was going to next and that made it so much more fun to read.
The Danvers Falcons, all of them, are winners in my book.