My complaint about this book I read for the female boxers: there is not NEARLY enough women boxing. Stop reading now if you care about plot spoilers, because they're at the heart of my reaction to this book. Ruth is sidelined from boxing after a particularly brutal match around page seventy, and her sponsor focuses on making her husband a champion instead. Although the pivotal fight is retold a couple of times from different perspectives, it's another two hundred and fifty pages before Ruth starts to teach Charlotte to box. And Charlotte never actually boxes outside of training; she gets in a fight, once, in which her training no doubt helps her, but which is not the same thing. Ruth is just about ready to start boxing again at the end of the book. In addition to sections narrated by Ruth and Charlotte (and not nearly enough of the former), there are long sections narrated by George, who provides a window into the lives of the men who pull the strings behind these matches. His story would be interesting enough on its own, but it goes on for, again, a long time and pulls focus from the boxing women that were the advertised reason to read the book.
In the end, I'm not sure what to think of this book. If it were somehow presented as something other than a story of female boxers, the characters and the narrative would be compelling. Since that does seem to be the intended subject of the book, it wanders disappointingly off the mark.
Overall: B-