Miriam Toews. (2021). Fight Night. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Miriam Toews. 2021. Fight Night. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Miriam Toews, Fight Night. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.

Miriam Toews. Fight Night. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.

OverDrive Product Record

sortTitle

Fight Night

crossRefId

6216054

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2183-1/{E7860FC2-5C64-4950-9987-E2E5067955EF}IMG100.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/2183-1/{E7860FC2-5C64-4950-9987-E2E5067955EF}IMG200.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/2183-1/{E7860FC2-5C64-4950-9987-E2E5067955EF}IMG150.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/2183-1/{E7860FC2-5C64-4950-9987-E2E5067955EF}IMG400.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg

formats

1. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781635578188
     2. • type: KoboBookID
        • value: b52fba73-6f89-3e6e-a68c-47f49672b1c8
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
2. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B092QZ4W8F
   • name: Kindle Book
   • id: ebook-kindle
3. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781635578188
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • id: ebook-overdrive

mediaType

eBook

primaryCreator

• role: Author
• name: Miriam Toews

id

E7860FC2-5C64-4950-9987-E2E5067955EF

title

Fight Night

starRating

3.6

dateAdded

2021-10-01T17:59:00Z

contentDetails

1. • href: https://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=141&titleID=6216054
   • type: text/html
   • account:
     • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
     • id: 1151

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain

False

formats

1. • fileName: FightNight_9781635578188_6216054
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 1183177
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781635578188
   • rights:
     1. • type: Copying
        • value: 0
     2. • type: Printing
        • value: 0
     3. • type: Lending
        • value: 0
     4. • type: ReadAloud
        • value: 0
     5. • type: ExpirationRights
        • value: 0
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
   • onSaleDate: 10/5/2021
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=e7860fc2-5c64-4950-9987-e2e5067955ef&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
2. • fileName: FightNight_6216054
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B092QZ4W8F
   • name: Kindle Book
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-kindle
   • onSaleDate: 10/5/2021
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=e7860fc2-5c64-4950-9987-e2e5067955ef&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
3. • fileName: FightNight_9781635578188_6216054
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781635578188
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-overdrive
   • onSaleDate: 10/5/2021
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=e7860fc2-5c64-4950-9987-e2e5067955ef&.epub-sample.overdrive.com

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Toews, Miriam
   • bioText: Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, Fight Night, and one work of nonfiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.
   • name: Miriam Toews

publishDate

2021-10-05T00:00:00-04:00

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

Fight Night

fullDescription

"Move over, Scout Finch! There's a new contender for feistiest girl in fiction, and her name is Swiv." -USA Today, "Best Books of the Year"

"Toews is a master of dialogue." -New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice

"A revelation." -Richard Russo
NPR Best Books of the Year * Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize * Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalist * Indie Next Pick * Amazon Editors' Pick * Apple Book of the Month

From the bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply wise novel about three generations of women.

"You're a small thing," Grandma writes, "and you must learn to fight." Swiv's Grandma, Elvira, has been fighting all her life. From her upbringing in a strict religious community, she has fought those who wanted to take away her joy, her independence, and her spirit. She has fought to make peace with her loved ones when they have chosen to leave her. And now, even as her health fails, Grandma is fighting for her family: for her daughter, partnerless and in the third term of a pregnancy; and for her granddaughter Swiv, a spirited nine-year-old who has been suspended from school. Cramped together in their Toronto home, on the precipice of extraordinary change, Grandma and Swiv undertake a vital new project, setting out to explain their lives in letters they will never send.
Alternating between the exuberant, precocious voice of young Swiv and her irrepressible, tenacious Grandma, Fight Night is a love letter to mothers and grandmothers, and to all the women who are still fighting-painfully, ferociously- for a way to live on their own terms.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
   • content: Toews is a master of dialogue, swirling the adults' perspectives through Swiv's imperfect ventriloquism as if she were mixing paints.
     
2. • premium: False
   • source: Nadja Spiegelman, New York Times
   • content: If the book's overwhelming tenderness makes the reader cry, they'll be, as Swiv's mother teaches her, 'tears of happiness.'
3. • premium: False
   • source: Los Angeles Times
   • content: A touching tribute to the matrilineal bond among three women of different generations.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Boston Globe
   • content: Toews will make you cheer and sob for all concerned.
5. • premium: False
   • source: Margaret Atwood via Twitter
   • content: Go Grandma Elvira!
6. • premium: False
   • source: Joshua Ferris, The Guardian
   • content: The last book that made me cry. It took only a line or two to be reminded of why I read fiction and why I write it. Toews doesn't simply narrate a story; she fashions a world.
7. • premium: False
   • source: USA Today, "Best Books of the Year"
   • content: A big-hearted, briskly paced family saga about the extraordinary love that binds three generations of free-spirited women together, and the tools and techniques that they've had to develop to survive.
8. • premium: False
   • source: Rumaan Alam on NBC-TV TODAY, "What to Read"
   • content: You wouldn't think it's possible to write a book about a family grappling with the legacy of mental illness that's also hilarious. But Miriam is such a beautiful and funny writer. She really locates the comedy in difficult life situations. I recommend it [Fight Night] so highly.
     
9. • premium: False
   • source: BuzzFeed, "Best Books of the Year"
   • content: I laughed and cried reading this book; I can't think of a higher endorsement.
10. • premium: False
    • source: Literary Hub, "Favorite Books of the Year"
    • content: Toews can always see the light through the darkness, and with grace and tenderness and humor, tells how to live with it, really live.
      
11. • premium: False
    • source: The Millions, "Most Anticipated"
    • content: A novel as moving as it is full of humor . . . As Susan Cole, in Now Magazine, says, 'Few authors mix humor and deep emotion with Toews's skill.'
12. • premium: False
    • source: New York Journal of Books
    • content: Miriam Toews [is] a master of the novel. Every book of hers is magic. This one's magic is terrifying, perhaps even more than others, but it's compelling and inescapable, demanding to be read.
      
13. • premium: False
    • source: New York Public Library "Staff Pick"
    • content: Nobody writes books like Miriam Toews-you feel her characters down to the bone, and she can straddle the horrific to the humorous across a single sentence. Fight Night is a hymn to women fighting for themselves and their families.
      
14. • premium: False
    • source: National Book Review
    • content: Beguiling . . . [A] wonderful tragi-comic work of fiction.
      
15. • premium: False
    • source: Feminist Book Club podcast
    • content: Gorgeous . . . Strong, vibrant matriarchs are hard enough to come by in literature. Even more so, when they are dynamic, hilarious, kind. [Fight Night] is a master class in confronting the darker corners of reality with acceptance and a view toward the future and toward expectation of joy.
      
16. • premium: False
    • source: The Southern Bookseller Review
    • content: Fight Night brings it. Every corner of human emotion is nudged, awakened, revealed . . . This novel is a reminder of the full potential of a book to connect us to our humanity and to inspire us to fight another day.
      
17. • premium: False
    • source: Publishers Weekly, starred review
    • content: Fierce and funny, this gives undeniable testimony to the life force of family . . . a knockout.
18. • premium: False
    • source: Kirkus Reviews, starred review, "Best Fiction of the Year"
    • content: [A] charming, open-hearted book . . . Funny and sad and exquisitely tender.
19. • premium: False
    • source: BookPage, starred review
    • content: Brilliant . . . Toews gives Swiv a voice that is sophisticated, childlike and utterly believable. . . . the wonder of Fight Night is that it's a warmhearted and inventive portrait of women who have learned to fight against adversity.
20. • premium: False
    • source: Publishers Weekly, "Holiday Gift Guide"
    • content: Women Talking author Toews is at the top of her game in this novel . . . [It's] fierce and funny, and gives undeniable testimony to the life force of family.
21. • premium: False
    • source: Gilmore Guide to Books
    • content: [A] tightknit, funny, ferocious trio . . . This novel, with its stream-of-consciousness style, unfiltered raucous humor, and hard-won wisdom is the kind of reading that makes me evangelical. I adored the girl and the women in Fight Night and am grateful to Miriam Toews to bringing them so beautifully to life.
22. • premium: False
    • source: R.O. Kwon, author of THE INCENDIARIES
    • content: In Fight Night as in her previous books, Miriam Toews is a genius. Her gigantic mind and heart are singular; her sentence-making powers, extraordinary. Living in a time when Toews is writing is a reason to rejoice.
23. • premium: False
    • source: Christina Baker Kline, bestselling author of THE EXILES and ORPHAN TRAIN
    • content: Fight Night is a headlong rush of a novel narrated by a precocious nine-year-old girl who is doing everything she can to keep her troubled mother from falling apart and her irrepressible grandmother alive. Tender, heart-wrenching, darkly funny, and ultimately joyful, this novel pulses
24. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      September 1, 2021
      

      Using details from her own family history, Toews (Women Talking) recounts a few weeks in the life of three generations of strong, complicated women. The novel is presented as an unsent letter from nine-year-old Swiv to her absent father. Suspended from school for fighting, Swiv helps care for her irrepressible but health-addled grandmother Elvira, while her mother, a pregnant actress, struggles with mental illness. The family history includes membership in a repressive religious community and several instances of suicide, so generational trauma is evident in the way each character approaches the world. When Swiv accompanies Elvira on a trip to California to visit two of her nephews (probably for the last time), the story becomes a comic, picaresque, and ultimately bittersweet adventure. VERDICT Swiv's narrative voice, by turns angry, sardonic, and full of both love and exasperation for her mother and grandmother, provides much of the charm and appeal of the novel. Elvira is a force of nature, charming everyone around her with her zest for life. Despite the dark elements in the story, the humor and love between the characters shine through. Recommended.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

      Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

25. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from August 23, 2021
      Toews (Women Talking) continues her consideration of the theme of women’s self-determination in this indelible and darkly hilarious portrait of an unforgettable Toronto family. Framed as a long letter to eight-year-old Swiv’s absent father in her brisk, matter-of-fact voice, it also features letters to her mother and others. After being expelled from school for fighting, she grows closer to her larger-than-life grandmother, Elvira, who “has one foot in the grave” and dives into homeschooling with gusto, convening so-called editorial meetings and devising assignments to write letters to one another. Meanwhile, Swiv’s mother, Mooshie, a pregnant actor, is prone to dramatic and sometimes violent mood swings, leading Swiv to fear Mooshie might succumb to the same mental illness that led to her aunt’s and grandfather’s suicides. The harder-edged Mooshie, who wants a “cold IPA and a holiday” for her birthday, and the exuberant Elvira, are both brash and fearless, traits that alternately embarrass and inspire Swiv. Through these women’s letters and stories, readers glimpse histories of grief, loss, and abuse, making Grandma’s assertion that “joy... is resistance” even more powerful. The moving conclusion, which has its roots in a plan for Swiv and Elvira to visit family members in California, shuns sentimentality and celebrates survival. Fierce and funny, this gives undeniable testimony to the life force of family. It’s a knockout.

26. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      September 15, 2021
      In this uproarious, tender, and wise epistolary novel set in Canada and California, nine-year-old Swiv describes the chaos and conundrums of day-to-day life with her moody, pregnant mom and rambunctious-but-always-at-death's-door grandmother Elvira. Expelled from school for fighting, Swiv spends her time taking care of, and being embarrassed by, Elvira, who homeschools her. She worries about her mom, an actress, and protecting her unborn sibling, Gord. Swiv's understanding of Elvira's past is a mythologized story that matches her grandmother's outsized, fighting spirit. The hilarious situations in which she and Elvira find themselves are testimonials to embracing life, and Swiv's youthful pronouncements on life, death, and love hit the mark. Men are mostly absent, including Swiv's father, and sometimes malevolent. Toews' (Women Talking, 2019) multigenerational family story of this trio of women barrels to a slapstick, touching, cycle-of-life ending. Elvira espouses an uplifting legacy: the wisdom that we're born with a light inside of us; that our job is to not let it go out; and that our ancestors are ahead of us to light the path.

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

27. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from August 1, 2021
      The author of Women Talking (2018) lets a 9-year-old girl have her say. The first thing to know about this novel is that it's narrated by a child writing to her father, who seems to have abandoned her and her pregnant mother. The novel-as-long-letter can often feel gimmicky, it's difficult to craft a child's voice that is both authentic and compelling, and it would not be unreasonable for readers to be wary of a book that attempts both. Readers familiar with Toews, however, may guess--correctly--that she's quite capable of meeting the formal challenges she's set for herself. "Mom is afraid of losing her mind and killing herself but Grandma says she's nowhere near losing her mind and killing herself." This is Swiv talking. "Grandpa and Auntie Momo killed themselves, and your dad is somewhere else, those things are true." This is Swiv's Grandma talking. "But we're here! We are all here now." This exchange captures the central concerns of this charming, open-hearted book. Swiv's mother--an actor--is a bundle of angst, rage, and stifled ambition. Swiv's grandmother, on the other hand, is the embodiment of joie de vivre, and it's Grandma with whom Swiv spends most of her time, filling the roles of caretaker and (sometimes reluctant) accomplice. Grandma is the type of person who befriends everyone she meets and who finds the joy in even the most ridiculous and--to her granddaughter--mortifying experiences. As the novel progresses, we discover that this ebullience isn't the natural product of a happy life but, rather, the result of a conscious decision to endure terrible loss without becoming hard. We also come to learn why Swiv's mom is so brittle. And we understand that Grandma, in all her glorious ridiculousness, is showing Swiv that the only way to survive is to love. Funny and sad and exquisitely tender.

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

1774

links

• self:
  • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/e7860fc2-5c64-4950-9987-e2e5067955ef/metadata
  • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json

id

e7860fc2-5c64-4950-9987-e2e5067955ef

starRating

3.6

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2183-1/{E7860FC2-5C64-4950-9987-E2E5067955EF}IMG100.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/2183-1/{E7860FC2-5C64-4950-9987-E2E5067955EF}IMG200.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/2183-1/{E7860FC2-5C64-4950-9987-E2E5067955EF}IMG150.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/2183-1/{E7860FC2-5C64-4950-9987-E2E5067955EF}IMG400.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg

isPublicPerformanceAllowed

False

languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Fiction
2. • value: Literature

publishDateText

10/05/2021

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9781635579789

mediaType

eBook

shortDescription

"Move over, Scout Finch! There's a new contender for feistiest girl in fiction, and her name is Swiv." -USA Today, "Best Books of the Year"

"Toews is a master of dialogue." -New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice

"A revelation." -Richard Russo
NPR Best Books of the Year * Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize * Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalist * Indie Next Pick * Amazon Editors' Pick * Apple Book of the Month

From the bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply wise novel about three generations of women.

"You're a small thing," Grandma writes, "and you must learn to fight." Swiv's Grandma, Elvira, has been fighting all her life. From her upbringing in a strict religious community, she has fought those who wanted to take away her joy, her independence, and her spirit....

sortTitle

Fight Night

crossRefId

6216054

awards

1. • source: Scotiabank Giller
   • value: Scotiabank Giller Prize Nominee

publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

bisacCodes

1. • code: FIC019000
   • description: Fiction / Literary
2. • code: FIC044000
   • description: Fiction / Contemporary Women
3. • code: FIC045000
   • description: Fiction / Family Life / General