Headshot

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, gender discrimination, child death, and bullying.

“Everyone knows the Victor sisters and what they’ve won and what they’ve lost and the judges treat Artemis’s family like old friends, which, in boxing, is especially infuriating because the gray area of a call is often so present, and if you know a judge has a special relationship with the participants, you can’t help thinking, I’m being slighted, this is the end of me, if only I had parents willing to befriend my coaches, if only I had parents who could get off work, who didn’t work, who could come see me win.”

In this passage, Bullwinkel establishes the dynamic between Artemis and Andi. Andi frames herself as an underdog by highlighting the bureaucratic preference the judges have for Artemis. Artemis is the favorite because she comes from a legacy family of boxers, whereas Andi comes to the match without a family reputation, much less a family to support her. Bullwinkel uses this observation to make Andi a sympathetic figure.

“If Artemis has a weakness it is in the fact that she is a legacy. Her sisters’ wins hang over her. She is reminded of them constantly. This is the tournament where she can be as good as her eldest sister, or the worst boxer in their family. The type of legacy that is the Victor family is rarer in boxing than in other kinds of sports, but not unheard of. Youth women’s boxing is a world small enough that the Victors could conquer it.”

While Andi sees the Victor family legacy as one of Artemis’s unique assets, Artemis looks upon her family legacy as an obstacle. This passage drives the idea that it isn’t enough for Artemis to win the fight, she also needs to prove that she is as good as her eldest sister. Bullwinkel once again commands the reader’s sympathy by heightening Artemis’s personal stakes to the extreme: either she is the best in her family or she is nothing.

“No one in her life at that point, including her daughter, will have any remembrance of the meaning attached to what it means to be a boxer. And the boxer part of Artemis will be long gone, too. She will have had four separate lives since the Daughters of America, not one of them involving boxing, and so her injury, these un-closable fists, will not be some battle relic, but, rather, a sorry, pathetic disability.”

The novel uses its asides into the future to hint at the impact that the girls’ boxing careers will have on their lives. In Artemis’s case, boxing will cease to have any relevance in the later stages of her life, undermining the importance of the tournament. On the other hand, boxing will have a long-term effect on her physical health, impacting her mobility through the accumulation of injuries.