Book Review: Blade by Wendy Walker

Wendy Walker’s latest novel is a harrowing look at the way that children are treated when adults care more about themselves and their own petty egos rather than actually nurturing the young lives in their care, as a young girl at a prestigious skating academy stands accused of the murder of one of her coaches.

Grace Montgomery is fifteen years old when she enters Ana Robbins’ life. Almost two decades earlier, Ana herself had been a promising young skater boarding at The Palace, an academy run by the legendary coach Dawn Sumner. Under a murky cloud that she never cared to explain to anyone, Ana abruptly quit the program after several years and moved home. Since then, she’s turned her back on competitive skating and dedicated her life to becoming a lawyer specializing in representing children instead:

I’m the youngest attorney in our practice of six, but I’m the best at connecting the dots. The firm’s founder, Jill Kirk, hired me to do just that, and I’ve proved myself. The facts, the circumstances–no two cases are the same. What has been done? Why has this child done it? There’s always a reason.

 

Because children are not born evil. We still don’t understand exactly how empathy, morality, and compassion develop–except that a child’s environment plays a major role. The damage begins the moment we get our hands on them. Some believe it starts in the womb.

 

I stood on that [conference] stage and told them what I know to be true.

 

“Children become what we do to them,” I said.

Now she’s been called back to The Palace by her old roommate, Jolene. Ana is shocked to discover that Jolene enrolled her own daughter, Grace, at a place that has such unhappy memories for them both. It wasn’t all bad times, though, as Ana, Jolene, and the two other “orphans” – as the kids who lived there without their parents were called – bonded over their unique situation and their shared love of skating. Ana still cares deeply about her old friends, and she very much cares that Grace doesn’t go down for a murder that the teenager refuses to talk about, much less explain.

This silence understandably complicates Ana’s determination to give Grace the best legal defense possible, but also reminds her painfully of her own refusal to talk about her experiences at The Palace. She’s thus utterly shaken when Grace finally tells her that it isn’t safe there… and that Ana is to blame.

Could the murder of Coach Emile, a man who had also trained Ana and her friends, somehow be due to something Ana had done or failed to do all those years ago? Or could it be due to Dawn’s infamous training methods that produced champions, no matter the personal cost? As Ana considers her latest client, she can’t help but think of her own experiences with Dawn and her coaching:

There’s no doubt [Grace] was well trained. She had been set to peak for next year’s Olympic cycle. Dawn was strategic–from the timing of a career to the placement of jumps in a program to maximize points. But that’s not what she was known for.

 

It was the other bullshit: The subject of her book and her methods to combat fear. It was fear that had cost her an Olympic bid, and so it was fear that had become her obsession when she retired to coach.

 

Performance psychology was deeply embedded in sports when I trained at The Palace, but Dawn had claimed it as her own, like she’d invented it. Everyone knew that controlling fear in competition was essential. But she went beyond that[.]

Ana’s determination to defend Grace soon collides with her desire to protect her own secrets. She didn’t have anything to do with Emile’s murder… or did she? Will Ana finally be able to confront her painful past, in order to solve the mystery and ensure that someone else isn’t punished for the mistakes that she herself once made?

Having also had negative experiences in boarding school, I found this book to be both harrowingly realistic and emotionally cathartic. I was entirely unsurprised to read in the Author’s Note at the end that Ms. Walker underwent a distressingly similar situation to both me and her characters; I’m only glad that it led each of us to actively pursue a practice of empathy. This novel is an excellent example of how much it matters that parents listen to their children and work at being their advocates instead of viewing their kids as mere extensions of themselves without any legitimate will of their own.

And despite the central focus here being competitive sports, Blade slots easily into the subgenre of dark academia as well. This is truly a masterclass of cross-genre writing from an author who understands the pressures put to bear on high-achieving girls, and how important it is for the adults in their lives to take responsibility for treating them as people instead of empty objects to be filled with their own ambitions and desires.