BLACK & BLUE

A debut sports novel focuses on professional women’s football in America.

In her book, Douglas draws on her 19 years of experience as the owner of the New York Sharks women’s pro football team to tell the story of a young athlete from Florida named Christine who dreams of playing the sport. As the author evocatively writes, the sport is woven into the cultural DNA of the region for half the population: “Football is the southern males’ identity and if their team is no good, their kingdom is not whole. A winning team, on the other hand, is southern salve—the cure-all, and the key to the good life.” As Christine learns while still a child, this immense sense of self-validation through football is exclusively a male inheritance. Through grit and perseverance, she seeks to find a way to live as she pleases, telling the therapist her mother takes her to that she knows Southern culture expects her to be “demure and cautious,” but, as she puts it, “I’d rather kick ass.” The tale follows her path to professional fulfillment, joining the Long Island Sharks, coming to know her teammates, and experiencing all the joys and stresses in her personal life that will be familiar to readers from the vast library of male-oriented football fiction. The team’s fortunes are chronicled in a series of intensely dramatized chapters filled with well-drawn characters caught up in the dream of overcoming their restrictive culture. “We are competitors and we crave the opportunity to prove ourselves,” thinks Christine at one point, and this stand is shared by all of her teammates as well. “Why do we play this game, any of us, male or female?” Douglas asks. “Is it some primitive need to demonstrate physical prowess? Or is it more simple than that…the joy of simply doing something for which we have an affinity?” In the course of her clearly autobiographical storytelling, she very skillfully captures that delight in simply doing something. She brings her various Sharks to life in ways that often feel more immediate than might have been possible in a memoir. She likewise vividly captures the broader sphere of women’s professional sports, a world that will be new to most readers. The settings outside of the sport are similarly well drawn, from the feel of the small-town South to the horror of Christine witnessing the 9/11 attacks in Manhattan firsthand, looking through binoculars at the shocking aftermath: “Bodies. Live humans are falling from the towers. Arms out, spinning and cart-wheeling and I am breathless as I try to assimilate what my eyes are seeing.” The author also conveys the rough humor and heartbreaking losses that are part of the camaraderie of any hard-fighting professional sports team—elements that readers have encountered many times in novels and memoirs, but are more strikingly dramatized in these pages because they’re seen through the perspective of Christine and her teammates, coaches, and adversaries. The book’s honest, straightforward tone makes it captivating reading.

A stirring, atmospheric tale that explores the world of women’s football.