How Women's Hockey Saved The World
by Alex Charns
MOST UNEXPECTED TAKE BOOKY
The judge's reasoning
Charns has stitched together a genuinely unusual voice for a hockey-dad memoir — one that swerves from locker-room farce to Catholic theology to Polish wartime trauma without ever quite losing the thread of a father trying (and often failing) to get out of his own daughter's way. The comparison of NHL rink dimensions to Noah's Ark and the extended, half-blasphemous riff on pucks-as-Eucharist wafers ("I can't stop myself and feel that if I don't compare a puck to the Eucharist itself, I'm OK") is the kind of digression that shouldn't work in a sports memoir and mostly does, because it's clearly the author's actual mind at work, not a bit performed for the reader.
The strongest material, though, is the small-bore parenting stuff: the helmet-fitting standoff in Chapter 3 ("You knocked it off!!" / "You are soooo stupid.") is a scene that any hockey parent — or any parent of a kid with sensory issues — will recognize instantly, rendered with enough self-implicating honesty ("I'm fundamentally a pushover") that it earns its comedy. WJ emerges as a real kid: defense-minded, stubborn, capable of taking a smart tripping penalty rather than listen to her dad's car-coaching. Tucker's conversion via Blaise's "I just scored a goal" grin gives the book an actual hinge-scene rather than just anecdote.
Where it falters is architecture — chapters wander, the Trump/misogyny frame promised in the opening pages (the title's whole premise) gets dropped for stretches, and the book hasn't yet earned its own thesis by page 44. But the voice is distinctive enough, and the family portraiture warm and specific enough, to be worth the award.
Judged by Arthur Beaumont — Non-Fiction · Memoir · Business · Self-Help
"A good non-fiction book changes one specific thing about your week."
Supporting passages
"It's probably a coincidence that the puck and the bread from which Communion wafers are made, are round. I just felt a shudder of blasphemic energy surge through my body."
An unexpected, sustained conceit that gives the memoir a voice distinct from the standard sports-parent genre.
""Dad, you don't know have to put it on." "OK, so you put it on." "I CAN'T!" "You do it!" "I'm an idiot, remember?""
A rapid, lived-in exchange that renders both father and daughter as specific, flawed, funny people rather than types.
"my silence and lack of attention landed a blow, not in a ring or in a rink, but to my own teenage daughter who had adopted the Wings as her team to be closer to her dad."
A rare moment of unguarded self-indictment that lands because the book has otherwise kept its distance through comedy.
Per-axis rubric scores
Every Booky-winning book is scored across all ten craft axes. The award is given on the top axis (or top two for premium tiers).
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