Loved this book! I'm a huge fan of female boxers so the premise for me was spot on. I thought that was a short inspiring and uplifting read.

LOVE this book. I recently got into Kickboxing when I started this book, so it was a great time to read. The story is wonderfully written. Gravity is an inspiring and relatable character. I If you love a powerful and uplifting story, this book is for you!

This was an amazing and uplifting story, if you are a person that knows much about boxing, this book will pull you in. Each chapter seems as it evolves around the boxing round match.

This story was beautiful and uplifting. The beginning dragged alittle for me but overall it was a great read. I ended up really loving gravity.

I was so torn about this book. On the one hand it was cool to find out more about the world of boxing. On the other hand it would have been cool to hve more of a story instead of just constant matches and weird blog entries throughout the story.
Gravity Delgado is a fierce female boxer who trains with a large cast of diverse characters. Her life at home is nowhere near as great as her gym life, which makes her want to spend most of her time in the ring. This look into Gravity's life shows her fight to get to the Olympics.
I picked this up because I have been really into sports romances lately. And I haven't read a boxing one. And to make it better, it was YA?! This should have been everything to me, but in some ways it fell flat for me. For instance, I was not a fan of the way the author didn't make this much of a story. It felt more like her stats and play by plays. I think that's an important part of the story yes, but I thought there needed to be more. The little glimpses into her mom, her family, and her weird romance with certain people, was always too short. And the way the author threw in those blog posts was weird too. It just threw off the flow I guess.
I did like representation in the book tho. All different cultures were well represented and Gravity was Jewish which also gave some religious representation. I liked all of these things were well represented in different ways. And because it was a book where the Olympics was shown, there were different cultures there too. It was great to see all these different cultures in an environment that I don't usually read.
As for the characters, I was a fan of Gravity and her brother, but not really anyone else. This is a very character driven story, so for the most part we only get to know Gravity. But I wish we had gotten to know many more of the characters. It was basically a telling of what they did and not a showing. And that got old about halfway through the story. Which is why it took me so long to listen to this. I couldn't decide if I wanted to finish it or if I wanted to DNF it.
This book was weird for me. I liked it at some parts and at others I was thinking to myself, why am I still listening to this. But overall I was happy I read it. I learned some new things about boxing and I got my fill of sports romances at the same time. Basically, this book wasn't a knockout for me, but it still lasted the full 12 rounds.

Can I just please say I LOVE Gravity "Doomsday" Delgado?

When I first started reading Gravity by Sarah Deming, I was concerned that the book was miscategorized - when we first meet Gravity, she is twelve. I was thinking this book should be a middle grade. But the author ages her quickly, and the sixteen-year-old Gravity is the main character in the book.

Gravity is half Dominican, half Jewish (Hebrew represent!!), lives with her alcoholic mother and younger brother Ty, but has an auntie and cousin on her father's side that help her out when she needs. Gravity wants to box, and she finds a home at the Cops N Kids gym, working under a famed boxer. Her coach is hard on her but she rises in the ranks, being one of two girls training at her gym. Gravity's goal is Olympic gold.

In her quest to achieve her dream, she makes friends (and enemies!) and learns a lot about life, love, boxing, fairness, and herself. I loved how her thing was chanting the shema before each fight, bringing her Jewish faith with her into the ring.

Deming clearly knows her stuff, and I was nodding along when Gravity went to compete in China and observes that the Chinese LOVE Americans, especially Americans of color. (I took a teacher trip to China seven years ago and remember fondly the clamoring of Chinese people wanting photos with all of us, but especially my African-American colleagues.) Deming uses her knowledge of boxing to really draw the audience into Gravity's experience.

This book will make you laugh, and will make you cry. Kudos, Ms. Deming, for bringing "Doomsday" Delgado into this world.

I was very excited to read Gravity. A female boxer? Sign me up!

However, I was quickly brought down to earth as I read this book, as there were things I really liked about the book, but other things that made me want to tap out.

I really enjoyed the concept of Gravity, with Gravity being a female boxer, and I was hoping that there would be a lot of details about boxing and that world. I think this was captured to a degree, but it was very odd to me that a girl with no money from a broken home would have enough money to be traveling around the world-especially as a teenager who would probably need permissions to go. With as awful as her parents were, I’m surprised that none of her extended family was trying to help her out more. Gravity really needed to be emancipated or get a new legal guardian.

I know that the author was trying to make the environment “gritty” and “real” but I don’t know if that really was captured in a way that felt real. I also wasn’t crazy about the news articles sprinkled throughout. I think those were distracting and took me out of the story too much.

I did enjoy Gravity’s journey from being a green boxer to being in the Olympics, even though it felt like she moved up the ranks really fast. I think I’d have preferred less of her personal life and more boxing. I did enjoy how she learned some important lessons towards the end, about life, and about winning and losing.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

I had a range of emotions when reading this book. I had really high highs, anxiety and I was weepy in some parts. I was hooked when I read the synopsis about a female boxer. I was hooked from the first word. Then the main character had the coolest name, Gravity Delgado. I loved this girl. I cannot say enough good things about her.

Gravity had a sh*ty life. She was half Jewish and Dominican with a drug and alcohol, drug-addicted and abusive mother. Gravity's dad left without a word when she was 8 years old. This girl was responsible for her little brother and she made sure he was taken care of, loved and safe. I liked how she didn't dwell on the hand life dealt her and she had an extended family with her cousin and aunt but the gym was her real family.

It was so refreshing to learn about the world of boxing and how female boxers have a harder road. Gravity had a father-daughter relationship with Coach Thomas. That man kept her humble. Gravity may have been a kick-ass boxer but she was still a young girl who was naive and too trusting. There were a few instances that I could tell a situation was not good for her and she suffered painful consequences as a result of a few of them. She loved and had her first heartbreak. I couldn't stand Lefty! He was so wrong but I was shocked we didn't get a better resolution to that relationship but as in real life we have all had a douche bag guy or girl break our heart with no closure. Her true love, in my opinion, was D-Minus. I liked that kid's swagger. I could go for a book about him in the future

There were two things I did not like. First, I did not like the blog entry style used when the report Carmen Cruz wrote about the bouts. They ruined the flow of the story. When I wanted to know the winners of the fights we had to wade through "posts" for information. Second, the book ended on a cliffhanger to me!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Book Review
Gravity by Sarah Deming
Publishing date: November 12, 2019
Read courtesy of Netgalley.com

I really enjoyed this book and look forward to recommending it to my high school students. It will appeal to a wide range of readers because it crosses cultural, gender, and pastime boundaries.

Deming did a nice job of giving characters personalities and motivations (for ex., why a guy named Monster always wore pink.) The characters had distinct and interesting personalities. Their interplay was purposeful and engaging. Readers will want to continue to read to go through the characters' ups and downs with them.

Not knowing Spanish or NYC culture, I had to look up quite a few terms (foods or the name of a game) that I couldn't figure out from their context. As a teen I probably wouldn't be as hung up, i.e. anal, about looking up those words, but as a former English teacher/current librarian, I had to 😉. I also didn't know some of the boxing terms - yes, I looked them up, too - even though they were a little easier to figure out. On the other hand, Deming did well explaining the difference between a puncher and a boxer, which was important to some of the characterizations.

Deming inserted off-color but tame humor that teens at which teens might groan but secretly appreciate. She also inserted a red herring in the story that really threw me off (no spoiler, but it included a selfie); I kept expecting this inclusion in the plot to have serious repercussions, but that never materialized. It was probably left in the story to show how distracted Gravity was at that point, but that could have been accomplished in a different way, especially since nothing came of it. There was also a gratuitous mention of Michael Phelps -- I'll assume to create the timeline and setting.

Favorite line: "Regrets are like roaches. Exterminate them before that multiply."

A missing piece for me is explaining how Gravity got the money to do all of her international traveling.

Milk became a motif. I have nothing more to say about this [yet].

I'll also have to say that I'll recommend this book to students who can keep a fairly large number of characters straight. In spite of often using nicknames and not given names, I still sometimes had difficulty with remembering which character had what role for this story.

FYI I can't believe there is a sport where the object is for one person to do so much damage to the other person that they fall to the ground and can't get up. That being said, I still enjoy a good sports novel. Boxing, possibly more than other sports (any other sport) is a total test of one's totality: physical and emotional strength, endurance, heart, etc. Other than bad judging, there's pretty much nothing that can impact which boxer gets their hand held up at the end of a bout.

Gravity enters the ring at 12 a novice, but by the time she's 16, she's undefeated and a Golden Gloves winner. She's a hero at home, too, caring for her eight-year-old brother because their father is gone and their mother is a selfish alcoholic. Her story is hard--in the ring and out of it, especially when she's betrayed by her first boyfriend.

When she's fighting, she's on her own, but she comes to realize that she can lean on her family, her coach, her friends from the gym, teachers, God, and her teammates. Religion doesn't play a huge role, but half-Jewish and half-Dominican, Gravity says the Shema before every fight.

Gravity's a tenacious young woman who, abandoned by her father and neglected by her mother, takes up first judo and then boxing as a means to directing her anger and energy. She signs on a a boxing gym and works her way up to the Rio Olympics, and along the way tries to take care of her little brother, sleeps with one of her teammates, alienates and fires her coach, gets picked up and manipulated by a rival coach, and finally comes to a precarious point of equilibrium. It sounds like a coming-of-age story that everyone could get behind, but I can't recommend it. Marital arts and sports like fencing exist in their present-day incarnations as ways of honoring old kinds of violent and defensive and offensive actions without reveling in the violence of their progenitor activities: training for war, training to kill. But boxing--especially in this book--glorifies the violence of the sport. Gravity loves seeing her opponents bleed, knowing that she's broken not just their spirits or their winning records but also their noses and jaws. Her interior monologue is a worrying one: she's quick to action, becomes angry easily, and reflects and regrets little, if at all.

In addition, the plot has holes big enough to drive a truck through, and numerous inconsistencies. There are logic problems galore. I can't recommend it to anyone, and would especially warn anyone away from it who has every experienced physical violence. I know the author was inspired by the women who competed in Olympic boxing and their roads to the competition, but Gravity shouldn't be anyone's role model.

I was given an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I was first pulled into this book because it promised boxing, interesting characters, finding family, and the story of a Jewish Dominican teenager aspiring for greatness.

There was boxing in the story but I wished that it focused on that more and less on the love interests.

The characters were definitely interesting, but I wished that some of them were developed more. I did really like the coach, though. He becomes the father that she never really had and I enjoyed how it showed that family isn't always just the people you're related to.

I really like the story overall. It featured a Jewish Dominican teenager that found love in boxing and aspires to go to the Olympics. It's definitely a heartwarming read.

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I thought this book was pretty good, it reminded me of the movie Girlfight in a way, only less romancy. Some of the book was kind of hard to get through which is why I rated it lower than 4 stars, it seemed like the part leading up to the fight was a little bit boring, the articles were skimmed over. I wanted to have a little more training/action/boxing stuff. I wasn't thrilled with the relationship part of it, her jumping into one with the one guy, then being all blushy with another without anything happening with that one, but it made it seem a little more real and a little less "book perfect"

I think this book would be great for people who like sports type girl power books with a bit of street in it.