Changing Cadence: Friendship, Football and the Art of Transition

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Samantha Miller

Andra Douglas didn't set out to write a book about transition. She set out to make sense of what happens when the one place that makes you feel most completely yourself suddenly doesn't exist anymore, and that's a much more interesting project. Changing Cadence is the result, and it's warm, funny, deeply human, and considerably harder to put down than a book about women's tackle football and assisted living communities has any right to be.

The structural choice at the heart of the novel is its greatest strength. Christine aging out of the quarterback position she has held for twenty years while simultaneously watching her mother Dorothy settle into a new life at The Commons in rural Florida gives the book two completely different registers of transition to work with, and Douglas moves between them with real skill. One story is about the athletic identity that has been the truest version of yourself for two decades suddenly becoming past tense. The other is about a matriarch relearning who she is when the home that defined her is no longer where she lives. Both of these are genuinely difficult things to write about without tipping into sentimentality, and Douglas doesn't tip once.

What makes the book genuinely surprising is what happens when those two worlds collide. Dorothy's circle of sharp, funny, completely unfiltered lifelong friends becoming unlikely superfans of Christine's final season is the kind of development that could feel forced on the page and instead feels completely inevitable. The cross-generational friendships that form are rendered with enough specificity and humor that you feel you've actually met these people, which is exactly what the best character-driven fiction does.

Douglas writes with the same fearlessness she apparently brought to every football field she ever played on. She doesn't edit herself toward safety. The result is a book that is laugh-out-loud funny in places and quietly devastating in others, often within the same chapter.

For readers who have ever stood at the edge of a chapter ending and wondered who they are without the thing that defined them, this book knows that feeling exactly and handles it with both honesty and grace.

About the Author

Andra Douglas

A native of central Florida and a graduate of Florida State University and Pratt Institute, Andra Douglas has been a National Champion athlete in rugby and as a quarterback in women’s tackle football, a Vice President/Creative Director at Atlantic Records/Time Warner, the founder of the Fins Up! Foundation for Female Athletes, a non-profit that benefits at-risk teens, the owner of the two-time national champion New York Sharks Women’s Pro Football team for 19 years, an inductee into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio and a known artist. She lives with her parrot, ‘Joi’ in New York City where she spends much of her time writing and working from her rooftop studio in Greenwich Village on her mixed-media artwork.