WITHOUT APOLOGY: Girls, Women, and the Desire to Fight

Learning to box alongside four inner-city teenage girls, Cohen delivers a sensitive, nimbly written account that is part memoir, part sports story and part critical inquiry into the nature of aggression. With a novelist's flair for detail (she's written two novels and two previous works of nonfiction), Cohen tells the story of sisters Jacinta, Sefina and Candi Rodriguez, their friend Nikki Silvano and their diminutive coach, Raphaëlla Cruz, one of the first amateur female boxing champions. Most of those drawn to the Boston-area Somerville Boxing Club are troubled in some way, Cohen suggests. Jacinta and Nikki are best friends, but some see them as too close; Nikki has an oppressive, difficult mother; before boxing, all the girls were quick to use their fists in disputes. Aggression is an essential aspect of female behavior, Cohen says, and its sublimation can result in the "relational aggression" discussed in Rachel Simmons's Odd Girl Out and other similar books. Cohen links her own forays into the ring to her own issues with weight, parenting and violence. "It was like falling in love with the last possible person on earth you thought you could be attracted to," she writes. Though the narrative turns away from the teenagers to focus, less rewardingly, on Cohen's experiences, this is an incisive look at female psychology and the surprising world of female boxing. Agent, Barney Karpfinger. (Feb. 15)