Featherweight by Mick Kitson

Every so often a book comes along and takes you away on an adventure. And I mean it doesn’t just tell you it’s going to do it or tell you all about it, it transports you. This is exactly what Mick Kitson accomplished with Featherweight, a novel that, despite its title, possesses a considerable gravity. Not to mention charm. Excitement. Pure joy of readership. Things like that.
And granted, I expected good things of Kitson. Sal, his previous novel, was an excellent tale of wilderness survival featuring a remarkably credible child protagonist. But it was a fairly straight forward and simple story comparing to this one. This is a grand adventure of a much larger scale. It, once again, features an excellent female protagonist, though this time she is slightly older.
Without further ado, meet Annie. Sold at just nine years of age by her destitute family to an aging out bareknuckle boxer named Bill Perry (a terrifically generous spirit who adores both The Queen and booze in seemingly equal measures), Annie’s got her life all figured out, between learning to fight and helping her adoptive father operate his pub, she’s tough enough and smart enough to take on all sorts of challenges. But then one day she steps into the ring to box a handsome young man who on principle won’t hit back and just like that new possibilities present themselves. Romantic ones, financial ones. There might be a promising future somewhere in there but there are just way too many obstacles to contend with, from a local highway bandit to Bill’s profligate ways to new laws and old ways and fiendish fops with too much money and so on.
One just has to put their fists up and not back down. If Stallone was a young woman (ok, that’s admittedly really difficult to imagine) and grey sweats were jerkins and 1970s city of brotherly something was Victorian England…all you’d need is a rousing theme song and you’d be in business.
Similar souls, maybe but this is much more elaborate of a story. And excellent in every way. It works superbly on a historical fiction level, doing a splendid job of bringing the time and place to life, it gets the boxing right, viscerally audibly punchingly so. But most of all, it wins you over with its terrific cast of characters. You gotta love these characters and their relationships, especially the surprisingly warm and loving father/daughter one between Annie and Bill. And yes, there’s romance too, a love at first punch, if you will, between Annie and a young man too good looking to box and too smart to let a good thing get away.
All in all, excellent. A grand gutsy spirited adventure. A sprawling brawling bodacious tale. A pugilistic picaresque to be passionate about. Loved it. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.