Join the (book) club — Lill’s Library is a biweekly series where former KidLit agent intern and avid reader Lillian Heckler tells you what young adult titles are taking up space on her bookshelf. This week, we’re reading We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry.

If you’re anything like me, you finally caught onto the Yellowjackets hype after the show’s third season came out this Valentine’s Day. And, if you’re even more similar to me, you’re also a cheapskate without the streaming services necessary to actually watch the third season.

Instead of coughing up $13 to see my favorite teen cannibals lose their minds in the wilderness, I’ve resorted to other coping mechanisms. For example, there’s an elaborate altar in my closet, complete with the face of Sophie Bathsheba Thatcher and about 300 votive candles. It’s bound to work at some point.

Kidding.

But I really have been coping, mostly through other forms of media and, of course, the written word. The closest comparison I’ve found to Yellowjackets’ dry wit and eerie atmosphere is this week’s book club pick, Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks.

We Ride Upon Sticks is a supernatural coming-of-age story about a high school field hockey team that will do anything to win the state championship — even if it means sending their town to “hell in a handbasket,” as the narrator says. Set in Danvers, Massachusetts, the site of the 1692 Salem Witch Trials, every sentence of the book crackles like a flame and charges like a defender.

Narrated in the collective “we,” the story throws you into summer 1989, in the middle of the Danvers High Falcons’ first scrimmage against Masconomet High at training camp. The narration is so enveloping that seconds after opening the book, it feels as if you’re a long-standing teammate, listening to the players heckle one another and collectively lose steam — “It was 92° in the shade. If we could’ve rolled over and offered our throats, our pale underbellies flashing in the July sun, we would’ve, each of us a white flag,” the narrator recounts. 

Turns out, your team sucks: Masconomet has scored on you 9-1.

Your team sucks so badly that no one even wants to be team captain anymore (aside from Abby Putnam, a descendant of the woman who accused the Salem witches, but she’s also the only one pretending to stay positive while Masconomet demolishes you). You ended last season with a bummer 2-8 record, the highest number of wins for the team in a decade, and it would take something of a miracle to make it to state championships this year. 

But you’re seniors. And one good season could change everything.

So when Mel Boucher, the team’s French-Canadian goalie who’s taken one too many losses, makes a pact with “the darkness” and causes an uptick in your wins at camp, you don’t ask many questions about the ritual. Instead, you sign your name in a notebook with 1980s heartthrob Emilio Estevez on the cover, tie a piece of blue tube sock around your arm, and hope for the best. Or maybe for the worst. You’re not sure how the whole witchcraft thing works yet.

All you know is that you must collectively feed Emilio’s power through various “dark” acts each week to guarantee a win. At first, it’s enough for your teammates to cuss at their parents or switch out the paint lids in the art room. But as the season continues, the stakes get higher, and Emilio gets hungrier. By October, the Falcons must ask themselves: How far will they go to win? What will it cost them? And what will they discover about themselves in the process?

Led by 11 offbeat 1980s teenagers, a sentient bleached bun named the Claw, and a probably medically concerning splotch developing on Mel’s neck, We Ride Upon Sticks slowly descends into the shadows of the spirits while simultaneously ricocheting into the floodlights on the field. Nothing will make sense until everything makes sense; that’s how you’ll know you’ve bought in.

The story is a strange celebration of friendship, adolescence, and rebellion — all the elements that make Yellowjackets zing, with a fraction of the gore. Barry effortlessly brings together an incredibly diverse cast of characters, switching between storylines and locations in a frantic yet organized fashion. Her experiences as a woman of color who graduated from Danvers High School in 1990 ground the darkly comedic tale, according to an interview in the Paris Review, building a genuine story of grit in the face of discrimination. By the end, you’re rearing to grab your stick and do something downright nefarious for the benefit of the Danvers Falcons.

May this spooky yet sincere story soothe your content hangover, reader, if only for 300-some pages. 

And be careful of what you wish for when you jot something down in your notebook.

Onto the next chapter.

Title	We Ride Upon Sticks
Author	Quan Barry
Genre	Historical, Supernatural
Form	Prose
Page Count	360
Favorite Quote	“Once we were all accounted for, the Claw took over the proceedings. In the sunlight, It looked like a snowy mountain peak, something over fifteen thousand feet that you could easily die on and was high enough up that your climbing party wouldn’t repatriate your body” (Barry 135).