The Keeper

July 1, 2022
Ervick grew up playing soccer in 1980s Cincinnati on an all-girl's team called "The 1971 Cardinals." She became a goalkeeper--a position she held throughout her career--and played with and against some extraordinary athletes. As her friendships, team associations, and society's trajectory each run their courses, she reflects on gender roles, particularly how they played out in the world of sports, and then looks at how sports contribute to (or possibly interferes with) her more creative identities as writer, artist, and mother. Ervick is heavy on detail, including a lot of history throughout her memoir, particularly about Title IX's influence on women in athletics; she also investigates the parallels between her life and Vladimir Nabokov's, a fellow goalkeeper-turned-writer. The illustrations are inventive in their range of styles (realistic versus rougher and more draft-like) and media (watercolor versus heavier, more opaque paint). This thought-provoking title will draw readers' attention to the fiftieth anniversary of Title IX while also satisfying fans of graphic memoirs, sports, and feminist history.

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August 8, 2022
Ervick (The Bitter Life of Bozena Nemcova) volleys an ebullient celebration of girls’ soccer that blends personal memoir and sports history into a work of disarming emotional power. In the 1980s as a goalkeeper for her youth team, Ervic makes it to nationals and develops a lifelong passion. “On the soccer field we were free to be tough, be aggressive, and be powerful,” she writes, recalling her coming-of-age soccer days as a kaleidoscope of camaraderie, competition, road trips, and friendships. She also notes unequal treatment and sexist questions from reporters. In the present, Ervick’s made the transition from soccer player to soccer mom, and unpacks the context of being in that first generation of American girls to grow up under Title IX, back through the history of women’s sports and early “lady footballers.” Her loose, colorful artwork, open page layouts, and lighthearted use of collage elements—vintage photos, clippings from her teenage diaries—create a casual style that belies the book’s fierce intelligence. Like the best sports books, it’s really about life: she gets into feminism, freedom, art, women’s bodies, and the loneliness of the goalkeeper (she quotes from fellow keepers Camus and Nabokov). The result’s a winning argument for women’s sports as a gateway to freedom and self-determination. Agent: Susan Canavan, Waxman Literary Agency

August 12, 2022

Ervick's (The Bitter Life of Bozena Nemcova: A Biographical Collage) valiant graphic novel is at once a memoir that details her experience in girls' club soccer in the 1980s and a grander historical review of women in soccer (from feminist teams of the late 1800s to the popularity of the women's World Cup in recent decades), sprinkled with literary reflections on goalkeeping. Ervick's personal story is at the heart of the book. Born close to the passing of Title IX in the United States, which prohibited sex-based discrimination in educational programs (and, by extension, athletics), Ervick lived the changes of second-wave feminism through her youth. Though Ervick's own experience is compelling, the tone of her book is difficult to define. The exponential rise of women's soccer in recent decades is a breathtaking victory, but Ervick's angle feels elegiac, a paean to earlier heroes who missed their chance at glory. Ervick's art draws on scrapbook-style illustrations that add to the feeling of reflection and memory and slow the pace of the winding narrative to a crawl. VERDICT Rich with informational content and flashes of brilliance, Ervick's graphic novel is thoughtful and personal, best suited for an audience interested in the topics of athletics and feminism that it delves so deeply into.

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