Puck Lit Project Review #3: Twenty Miles by Cara Hedley

Plot Summary: Isabel Norris (aka Iz, named after Isobel Stanley, daughter of Lord Stanley) is the daughter of a hockey player who died young, before she was born. Raised in Kenora by her grandparents, she plays hockey on boys’ teams throughout her youth until she is recruited by a university in Winnipeg to play for their women’s team, the Scarlets. In her new situation, Iz begins to question whether playing hockey is what she really wants to do.

Genre: Fiction, Women’s Hockey

Hockey Content: Lots of descriptions of the Scarlets’ practices, locker room, and games.

Choice Quotation: “‘I’m just so thrilled for you!’ she sang. ‘Finally, a team full of girls for you!’ I’d gotten this a lot. As though I’d been held hostage by that long line of boys’ teams, as though I finally got to choose. But choice had never been a part of it. I don’t remember when I first started to play. I don’t remember not knowing how to play. … This isn’t one of those destiny manifestos - the sport chose me! We were meant to be together! No. But choice was never part of it.”

My Thoughts: During my search for hockey literature, I haven’t encountered many books written by women. I have stumbled upon (but not yet read) a surprising number of romance novels, such as the Blades series by Deirdre Martin, See Jane Score by Rachel Gibson, and more. Check out this list of the best in hockey romance from Amazon if you’re interested. Who could have guessed that the best game you can name would be such a fertile source of material for the romance genre? Hockey isn’t about love and flowery stuff. It’s about the eternal struggle of man to conquer a beautiful yet inhospitable environment. Just as there’s no crying in baseball, there’s no room for cuddling in hockey (unless you count goal celebration hugs, which obviously are very different).

Anyway, the point is that hockey is extremely manly, and most hockey books are by men and about men. In terms of non-fiction, Lorna Jackson’s Cold-Cocked (published in 2007) has been called “the first book-length appreciation of NHL hockey written by a woman,” and as far as I can tell, Twenty Miles (also published in 2007) is the first novel written by a woman about women’s hockey. (If you know of another, please let me know.)

As a woman who enjoys watching and writing about hockey, I was hoping this apparently pioneering book would be good, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s very well-written, and it’s a really interesting take on the traditional image of the hockey playing boy whose father is his biggest influence: this time we’ve got a hockey playing girl, and the father is nothing but a memory for her to contend with. Iz and her grandmother Sig, the two main characters in the novel, are both easy to identify with and care about, while Iz’s Scarlets teammates are funny and likeable. Author Cara Hedley played university hockey and I think it shows in her descriptions of the games and the team’s interactions with each other. Despite all my focus on the fact that this is a woman’s book about women’s hockey, I don’t feel like the gender issue is the overwhelming theme of the book: the story is more of a coming of age type thing, with Iz’s need to figure out what she wants for herself and how that fits in with what her family might want for her being the central problem.

Rating: 4 pucks out of 5. Great read!