Anais' Annotations: "The Cheer Leader" by Jim McCorkle

The mention of a cheerleader probably invokes visuals of the all-American, happy-go-lucky, girl-next-door type who is always happy to support the team under those Friday night lights. Jo Spencer, however, is not quite a picture-perfect part of the cheer squad in Jill McCorkle’s 1984 novel “The Cheer Leader.” This story is about so much more than football games.

Rather, this novel is about the maddening nature of what it means to live up to the standards of womanhood in the South.

One of my favorite parts of this book is how it opens. The first portion of the novel is done in a format that mimics the epistolary. Epistolary format is usually for books written as diary entries or letters, but McCorkle takes a different perspective. Instead of writing, Jo reviews family photographs and describes what she is seeing. Some of these photos are even narrated before Jo’s birth.

This opening narration gives readers the first impression that everything is not what it seems. The set up is kind of like a scavenger hunt, trying to put the pieces of Jo’s life together through the photographs that have made up her life.

While I love this opening, it may frustrate some readers that it takes so long to get to the main meat of the story. The review of photos gives so many key details for events to come, but I can also see how it can get boring after a while to get all these pictures with very little idea of where it is all going. I also realized during my reading that I was working a little too hard to connect the photos from the beginning to events later, and some of them just are not that important. I would advise you to be interested in those pictures without being too engaged in working out the connections later.

The main plot that comes in later changes the pace of the story very quickly. The writing style starts leaning into stream-of-consciousness. This style may be a little hard to keep up with at first, but it becomes clearer the longer you read. The choice to use such a psychological narrative is so important in allowing readers to get up close and personal with Jo’s inner workings.

Most of the story relies on her inner thoughts– the things Jo would never dare to voice. In this way, the reader becomes closer to Jo than any other character because only the readers know how she is really feeling when social pressures force her to act otherwise.

Possibly the best feature of this book is McCorkle’s masterful crafting of Jo’s love interest and simultaneous antagonist, Red. Readers know that Red is manipulative and abusive despite Jo being madly in love with him. In my reading, I found that Jo’s inability to recognize such obvious problems almost created a friction in how I interacted with her character. Note that the main conflict of this story involves a toxic romance between the two, so there are some triggering themes including domestic violence and abuse.

While it may not be for everyone, I found “The Cheer Leader” to be a piece that was easy to become invested in. The entire time, I just wanted to know more about Jo. This work subtly portrays the problems of gender norms in the South while also staying engaging as you follow Jo’s frightening descent into madness. I give this novel a 9.5 out of 10.