Vintage Contemporaries / The Knockout Queen

Chapter 1
 
When I was eleven years old, I moved in with my aunt after my mother was sent to prison.

That was 2004, which was incidentally the same year the pictures of Abu Ghraib were published, the same year we reached the conclusion there were no weapons of mass destruction after all. What a whoopsie. Mistakes were made, clearly, but the blame for these mistakes was impossible to allocate as no one person could be deemed responsible. What was responsibility even? Guilt was a transcendental riddle that baffled our sweet Pollyannaish president. How had it happened? Certainly he had not wanted it to happen. In a way, President Bush was a victim in all this too.

Perplexingly, the jury had no difficulty in assigning guilt to my own mother as she sat silently, looking down, tears running and running down her face at what seemed to me at the time an impossible rate. Slow down, Mom, you ll get dehydrated! If you have never been in a criminal courtroom, it is disgusting. You have seen them so often on TV that seeing an actual one is grotesque: the real live lawyers, all sweaty, their dark mouths venting coffee breath directly into your face, the judge who has a cold and keeps blowing his nose, the defendants who are crying or visibly shaking, whose moms are watching or whose kids are trying to sit still in the back. It s a lot to take in when you re eleven and even just a few months prior you were making an argument that not receiving a particular video game for your birthday would be unfair.

The town to which my little sister and I were relocated after a brief stint in foster care was a suburban utopia a la Norman Rockwell, updated with a fancy coffee shop and yoga studio. We moved in just before the Fourth of July, and I remember being shooed into a town fair, where there were bounce houses and hot dogs being sold to benefit the Kiwanis club. What the fuck was the Kiwanis club? I was given a wristband and ten dollars and told to go play. A woman painted

Rufi Thorpe received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2009. She is the author of Dear Fang, with Love and The Girls from Corona del Mar, which was long listed for the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize and for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. A native of California, she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and sons.

A Kirkus Fiction Writer to Discover 

[An] electric portrait of adolescence.
TIME

Full of verve and sketched in colors as vibrant as a Tilt-A-Whirl David Hockney landscape.
Los Angeles Times

The story of [Bunny and Michael s] intense, beautiful, life-wrecking friendship bursts with intelligence, humor and moral insight.
People
 
A tender, furious ode to the connections that somehow still endure, despite everything.
Entertainment Weekly

The Knockout Queen is a must-read.
CNN
 
Ultimately, The Knockout Queen delivers its intended punch with a complex story of friendship, family, right and wrong, and the fragility of teenage angst. The eventual resolution of Michael and Bunny s fates is also a searing reminder of how one action can change your trajectory, putting your life on a course different from the one you imagined for yourself.
San Francisco Chronicle
 
In Thorpe s Technicolor world, everyone is an innocent and everyone is culpable and no one is absolved, and the result is a novel both nauseatingly brutal and radically kind. Brilliantly off-kilter and vibrating with life.
Kirkus (starred)
 
Thorpe comes back swinging with her best novel yet. . . . The Knockout Queen is a moody and mordantly funny contemplation of the rigors of growing up that will leave readers reeling.
BookPage (starred)
 
Thorpe always has a way into a character that makes them known to you, of bringing small details, humor, and observation to light, that you find yourself remembering the person as if they were in your own life. . . . It allows a level of intimacy, of knowing, of actually falling in love with the flawed people who inhabit the pages. Thorpe s gift and well-honed talent is clear, palpable, and, for me, undeniable. . . . She has reached a rare status of authors for me: I will read anything she writes.
Martin McClellan, Seattle Review of