Right away, we know this isn’t Million Dollar Baby this is kickboxing’s G.O.A.T. When we meet her, Logan is already a force, the undisputed queen of her fitness kingdom. Perhaps where sport serves this story best is in the context it provides for the powerful female characters, particularly Logan Russo. ![]() Thanks to incendiary bedfellows trust and betrayal, the story sweats with tension. Each point of view character and their respective voice adds to the narrative and pulls at the threads of the vanished money, by turns unraveling the mystery and tightening the knot. The story is told from multiple points of view with calculated intention. Much more compelling is what’s happening inside each point of view character’s internal ring as they grapple with themselves and the pressures upon them. Over the course of the story, we spend little time inside an actual kickboxing ring, but we don’t need to be there. Strike Me Down is not sports fiction, nor does it intend to be. Nora is no stranger to tracking down vanished money, but what she isn’t prepared for is how she becomes entangled with both Gregg and Logan and must struggle to keep her personal and professional lives in their separate corners. Nora’s tidy principles are tested when Gregg Abbott walks into her firm with a twenty-million-dollar problem: The hugely successful company Gregg has built with his business partner and wife, the legendary kickboxer Logan Russo, is about to host a kickboxing tournament with the largest-ever purse, but the prize money has gone missing. As both combat sport and high-dollar entertainment business, kickboxing is a maul, cleaving apart the central characters’ civilized selves from their baser desires, exposing a raw edge and forcing them to face truths about themselves and each other.įorensic accountant Nora Trier has made a career-and a life-out of being as independent as possible. In Strike Me Down, the latest novel from Mindy Mejia, the sport of kickboxing does indeed provide the central metaphor, but it also functions as a tool for characterization. Finally, and perhaps the fan favorite among the baseball literature set, sport can be the bearer of metaphor, illuminating a story’s themes and embodying its questions and obsessions. Sport can offer the setting, a nuanced world and culture in which other dramas unrelated to the sport play out. It can be the force that propels the plot forward ( The big game is coming) or the source of the drama itself ( Will they make it to the championship? Will they win?). In works of fiction that might be considered “sports fiction,” sport serves a particular purpose in the story.
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