Staff Reviews

The Knockout Queen is an intimate, articulate, violent book about good and bad people and good and bad things and all of them just happening to each other all the time for no reason except that they can. Definitely an early contender for the book of 2020. Michael, the drollest teenaged narrator since forever, lives tenuously in an LA suburb with his scraping-by aunt after mom’s gone to jail for stabbing abusive, drunk dad. His only close relationships are the decades-older men he hooks up with on Craigslist and his neighbor Bunny, daughter of the town’s leading real estate shyster. She's an Olympic hopeful, but she's also a teenager trying to navigate high school, loyalty, and boys as a girl who’s 6-foot-3. So much of the novel is about examining morality – how do you judge a person’s moment at the edge, how do you put it into context? – but those questions are put into sharp relief when juxtaposed against the book’s numbing understanding (is this the new nihilism?) that no matter what they do, this generation is going to end up worse off than the one before them. Does it even matter if their futures are dashed? What’s left are a couple of kids clinging to each other to whom Thorpe gives the enviable, pitiable, beautiful, and ugly depth of real, living, breathing human beings. Are they moral? Who cares - they are ALIVE.

Michael is your average gay teenager, albeit one living with his aunt and cousin because his mom went to prison for stabbing her then-husband in self-defense. Because their neighborhood in North Shore (not the once-tourist destination in Riverside County but a fictional community adjacent to Manhattan Beach) is in teardown transition, they live next to the real estate agent and developer Ray Lambert and his daughter Bunny, a champion volleyball player somewhat stymied socially by her oversized presence – I was reminded of Alice in Wonderland nibbling on the Eat Me cake. Michael’s messing around with an older guy he met on Grindr and Bunny, well she’s also involved in a somewhat inappropriate relationship. But worse than that, Bunny’s response to a former friend trashing Michael leads to an oversized reaction. Michael alternates his own story and with being the Nick Carraway to Bunny’s. I was entranced by Michael’s compelling voice and found the story stayed with me afterwards as I plotted the ethical compasses of each of the characters. It’s a funny, moving, and sometimes shocking story. Insert your own knockout pun here.

At 11 years old, Michael is forced to move in with his aunt after his mother goes to prison. It’s there that he sees his next door neighbor, Bunny, for the first time, and he’s immediately fascinated. It’s not sexual attraction. Michael has known he’s gay since about the time he got there, and the two are so different in so many ways. But once they become friends it’s clear that neither one has ever felt so understood. For the first time, another person sees the fear and pain they’ve suffered. The Knockout Queen is a glaring look at the mess life can become, for kids and their families, for lovers and friends of all kinds. It’s an unblinking view of the fickle and sometimes inhuman realities that come from being human. Still, I loved it. Michael is the most riveting retrospective character I’ve met, as he looks back to a time when he was just beginning to see that love and people are deeply flawed and unexpectedly violent. The sincere way he throws out his stark, super-smart observations of everything, without hesitation, is endearing and magnetic. Best of all, he’s so damn funny! And he never accepts that what he sees is all that’s possible, giving him a resilience which easily carried me through to the end. Thorpe is a gifted writer, showing us with rare clarity how our complicated emotional world operates. She has a very special voice, and one that I want to hear again!