HOW WOMEN'S HOCKEY SAVED THE WORLD

A proud hockey dad reflects on the challenges that his daughter faced as a player in this memoir.

Charns’ daughter, WJ, was not quite 4 years old when she received her first pair of skates, and she was only 6 when she joined the roster of a hockey team for the first time. The author’s wife, Tucker, initially loathed hockey—she considered it “odious and odiferous.” But she not only changed her mind, but began to play the sport as well and even competed against the author in a league game. With an unrelenting jocoseness—the author delivers his remembrance in the form of a stand-up comedy routine—Charns details the trials and triumphs of being a hockey dad, a role that was especially daunting when WJ, then 16, was tauntingly called a “puck slut” by a rival player. The author explains his own fascination with the game—it creates a rule-governed universe that first appealed to him as a happy corrective to the troubled uncertainty of a “childhood basted in alcoholism and mental illness.” Women’s hockey doesn’t really save the world, as the book’s title comically suggests. But the author fantasizes about a teenage hockey player who fends off a lascivious grope by Donald Trump—Mr. T in the story—preventing him from ascending to the presidency. That yarn is a microcosm of the book—admirably opposing misogyny in all its ugly forms and more gently humorous than laugh-out-loud funny. Charns’ recollection is liberally studded with lighthearted one-liners: “If a coach, parent, bystander, or Zamboni driver is of the learned opinion that a child’s hockey development is not being met, that person is duty-bound by a little-known US-Canadian treaty from the time of the French and Indians wars, to inform DSS of this travesty in the making.” Packed with a multitude of personal details, this brief memoir—at under 60 pages, it’s more of an essay than a book—will appeal to hockey fans and readers who know the author and his family.

An amusing but idiosyncratic hockey account.