The Church of Wrestling

“Sometimes there's a moment where two people split and both keep going.... No matter what, we're going to find each other.”

This novella is so much about grief and yet, not much about grief at the same time.

Jenny, at age 11, losing her wrestling tournament and her mother on the same day sends her adrift from all she's ever known. She quits wrestling, and finds her reprieve solely in TV shows. This book doesn't touch greatly on what it feels like in losing a parent, but gives metaphors instead and indirect conversations to cover the exact emotions. Like with Jenny suddenly being caught up in TV, and protective of her time with the shows (like getting upset at her dad and ‘Uncle' Mike for talking too loud and turning up the volume defiantly or when in an argument with her father, takes the tv upstairs to her bedroom saying “its mine”) we can dot the line from this current moment to when at the hospital to visit her mother a Nurse wanting to be helpful tells Jenny to watch TV saying: “Sometimes it's nice to have the company.”

The connected lines being this is what Jenny uses and needs to escape the feelings of this situation. Finding solace in the company she experiences with TV shows while in all reality is a girl whose abandoned in multiple ways. We're on the outside of this ordeal as much as Jenny is. Months go by and then years go by. Her life the same rhythm until a defining moment when she discovers her dad starting his own cult religion “Church of Wrestling.”

When we get conversations with the father again he's odd and frantic. Desperately clinging on to words Jenny cried in frustration to him the day her mother died and she lost the wrestling match “How do you strike first in Death” as his purpose to find out and solve.

It gets weirder from here, her dads situation I hadn't seen coming. I was hopeful that this would be the turn in the novel where we'd start getting more inside Jenny's head, and her thoughts and feelings in all of this. But it progresses on the same, filled pages of interactions that aren't ever clear in the emotions or intentions but wistful metaphors guiding you into how Jenny is processing these horrible events and situations around her.

I wasn't the most excited over learning her dad having brain cancer, and it having to of appeared before he even left for russia. I felt like in learning this. it had delegitimized her fathers own anguish and peril at losing his daughter, losing wrestling, and losing Jenny's mother. It brought up more questions than answers in how that particular fact could play into her father starting his own religion and leaving for Russia to pursue the meaning of “strike first in death”

Simply, I'd of liked to of felt closer to Jenny and not so torn away from her. I'd of liked a little more directness to who she was/is during this, the vague heart touching conversations becoming almost overdone. And I'd of liked if that one plot point I mentioned in the Spoiler tag to of been either omitted or expressed upon a bit more in the type of questions it brought up for me that I could of only assumed others would of had as well.