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A review by aoutrance
The Longshot by Katie Kitamura
4.0
For the POPSUGAR challenge "author with the same first or last name as you". It was a more effort than I thought it would be to find a title for this one! Not because my first name is uncommon by any means, but it seemed like such a cop-out to just blindly point at any one of dozen contemporary romance novels and go (and no power on Earth was going to make me read Katie Pavlich's drek). So I tirelessly trawled through three whole pages of results before finding something appealing: Katie Kitamura's The Longshot.
Since falling ass over tea kettle for ice hockey, sports writing and fiction has been on my radar a lot more often. This novel is about the three days that lead up to an MMA rematch between our lead character Cal and the legendary Rivera, with Cal's trainer Riley as guide through their fraught history.
The dialogue in this is such hetero dude speak. Simple structures, varying emotional tone even if the words are the same over and over. A lot of things said between the lines because the characters can't seem to bring themselves to say it aloud.
Riley scouted Cal out of high school wrestling, trained him and his rise was meteoric - until it wasn't. A typical sports story - this rematch with a champion fighter is a redemption of sorts. There's fear, doubt and worry all leading up to the final culmination of the fight, which is left fairly ambiguous.Cal doesn't win, which almost seemed so obvious that I thought Kitamura was going to do the obvious just to fuck with us, but Cal also may or may not live through the beating he put himself through just not to be a KO. Regardless of which of if he lives or dies, he'll definitely never fight professionally again.
Since falling ass over tea kettle for ice hockey, sports writing and fiction has been on my radar a lot more often. This novel is about the three days that lead up to an MMA rematch between our lead character Cal and the legendary Rivera, with Cal's trainer Riley as guide through their fraught history.
The dialogue in this is such hetero dude speak. Simple structures, varying emotional tone even if the words are the same over and over. A lot of things said between the lines because the characters can't seem to bring themselves to say it aloud.
Riley scouted Cal out of high school wrestling, trained him and his rise was meteoric - until it wasn't. A typical sports story - this rematch with a champion fighter is a redemption of sorts. There's fear, doubt and worry all leading up to the final culmination of the fight, which is left fairly ambiguous.