53 pages • 1-hour read
Spectacular Things
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death.
What the Pursuit of Greatness Requires
Spectacular Things advocates the idea that greatness comes in many forms and is less about fame and trophies than about overcoming hardship and approaching life with passion and love. The novel uses Cricket’s relationship with soccer to examine the motivations, strategies, and mentality needed to become great.
Willingly enduring the physically punishing demands of elite athletic training requires meaningful and lasting sources of motivation, which in Cricket’s case come from the people she loves. Her desire to be a star soccer player originates with her mother. Unable to realize her own dreams of playing soccer professionally, Liz pours her passion for the sport into Cricket and her time, skill, and money into Cricket’s training. Even after Liz’s death, her spirit appears to Cricket on the soccer field, mitigating Cricket’s grief and reminding her that through soccer, her connection to her mother is never lost. Cricket is also motivated by the sacrifices Mia makes to support her, including giving up playing soccer herself and leaving Yale. Only by achieving success at the highest level, Cricket feels, can she earn and repay these sacrifices. Coach Oliver’s mentorship is also a great source of motivation. His unwavering belief in Cricket inspires her to believe in herself and push past perceived limitations. Finally, her friendship and rivalry with Sloane stimulates Cricket’s competitive spirit and pushes her more.
The narrative illustrates the types of habits and resources that professional athletes often use to hone their abilities, maintain their focus, and utilize their full potential: for Cricket these include visualization, resetting actions, and a support network. Visualization involves meditating on the image of a goal, which primes Cricket’s brain and body to respond effectively when opportunities arise. Resetting actions are techniques the Lowe women use to snap themselves out of a maladaptive emotional response after a setback and refocus on their goals. Cricket describes it as “using your body to trick your mind” (144). After making an error on the field, she claps her hands three times and pulls up her socks, having trained her mind and body to respond to this action by grounding herself in the present moment. Cricket also leans on the support of those around her: friends and family who provide transportation, healthy meals, sufficient rest, and morale boosts, among other things.
Perhaps most importantly, achieving greatness requires a mentality that advocates perseverance, accountability, willingness to sacrifice, self-discipline, and a positive attitude. Cricket exhibits these traits of a growth mindset. Liz teaches her daughters they must “stay focused and play through every obstacle if [they] want to be the best” (40). Her oft-repeated sayings, like “No pain, no gain” and “you’re a Lowe, not a quitter” (4, 40), embody this mindset.
Cricket perseveres through self-doubt, exhaustion, and pain: “She ignores the voices that tell her she’s not good enough. She listens to her body complain and says, Okay, yes, but one more” (265). She’s able to do this by recognizing that pain is an unavoidable part of life, but how she reacts to it is her choice. Instead of dreading pain, she decides to relish it as a sign of progress on the path to success. The narrative tone toward such decisions reinforces the idea that greatness is a series of choices. As Cricket learns that she can’t control everything in life, she gains a better understanding of what she can control and what that means: “The minutes and the days that add up to her life belong to her, and so it’s on her to make them count” (264). This insight helps her accept loss and hardship while maintaining belief in her abilities and hope for her future.
Sacrifice as an Act of Love
The ad copy for Spectacular Things features the questions: “What would you give up for the person you love most? What would you expect in return?” (“Spectacular Things: Reese’s Book Club.” Penguin Random House). Many characters make sacrifices for the people—or sport—they love as they navigate the tension between personal dreams and family loyalty, but Mia and Cricket’s relationship epitomizes the novel’s message that productive sacrifice goes hand in hand with love. At first, the sacrifices Mia and Cricket make for each other are characterized by a sense of imbalance, but given time, the sisters learn that sacrifice is a love language inscribed in their DNA, a choice made from love that benefits them both as it brings them closer together.
In the sisters’ youth, Mia sacrifices her own dreams to support Cricket’s time and again. She uses a soccer metaphor—“forever the sweeper to her sister’s keeper” (129)—to describe their dynamic. The potential for this dynamic to become entrenched, leading to resentment and unfulfilled dreams on Mia’s side, creates tension and prompts questions about familial obligations and the comparative value of one’s dreams.
However fair or unfair the sacrifices Mia is asked to make for Cricket, she’s always given a choice. She agrees to give up soccer and her free time as a teenager because she believes her mother deserves the help she’s asking for, having sacrificed her own teenage dreams to raise Mia. Mia also senses that Cricket’s love for soccer goes much deeper than her own. Mia’s early dreams, like playing soccer and attending Yale, are shaped by external expectations. In time she recognizes that they aren’t as important as she’d once thought, making her loss less painful. The novel makes clear that the connection between sacrifice and choice is not always selfless. Cricket’s relationship with Yaz ends because Cricket consistently chooses soccer over the relationship; in other words, she prioritizes her professional goals as most important to her. This informs the significance of her choice to give up soccer to donate her kidney to Mia: She loves Mia even more than soccer. Her sacrifice is a choice she makes out of love.
The novel rejects the idea that sacrifice is solely defined by burden and loss. Mia learns to recognize what Cricket truly needs from her; her choice not to accompany Cricket to UCLA is a clear statement that Cricket is no longer dependent on Mia being a pseudo parent. In this case, Mia doesn’t have to give up something truly wants: being with Oliver. After prioritizing her own needs long enough to create the life she wants—married to Oliver and pregnant with their child—Mia observes: “It seems only right to help Cricket achieve her life goal now that they are well on their way to getting exactly what they want” (270). This demonstrates the importance, and possibility, of balance in sacrifice. Giving her time and energy to Cricket serves Mia as well. It reduces her fear of becoming a mother by reminding her that she’s capable of giving “with her whole heart” (268), as their mother did. The final sacrifice in this arc, Cricket ending her career playing soccer to save Mia’s life, demonstrates balance in their give-and-take over time. The fact that Cricket finds happiness in new dreams shortly after, coaching the National Team and marrying Sloane, reinforces the idea that sacrifices made with love don’t result in loss but bring more abundance and create more love.
The Profound Bond Between Mothers, Daughters, and Sisters
The relationships that comprise Spectacular Things’ main family unit—mother, daughters, and sisters—are approached with a reverent and celebratory tone. The narrative develops its message about these bonds through sports team metaphors, the Lowes’ arcs, and the grieving process that follows Liz’s death. Ultimately, the novel characterizes mothers, daughters, and sisters as those who fiercely support and shape each other, share passions, honor and forgive each other, push each other to be their best, grieve together, and celebrate each other’s happiness.
Liz’s approach to raising her daughters is influenced by the lack of affection from her own parents: “While Lenora had treated Liz as the competition, Liz championed Mia as her first-round draft pick, her number-one teammate” (42). This teammate metaphor emphasizes Liz’s commitment to a supportive dynamic within the family unit she’s creating, one in which its members work together toward shared goals just as athletic teammates do. Liz furthers the comparison between teams and families by naming her daughters after “lifelong friends and teammates” Mia Hamm and Kristine Lilly (56), predicting that her daughters will share the same bond. When Mia gives up playing soccer to support the needs of the family, she acknowledges that in essence, she’s playing for a new team, with Liz and Cricket as her new teammates. Given how much the Lowe women appreciate the clear rules of soccer in an otherwise chaotic world, these metaphors help them answer questions about what family members owe each other and how much they can accomplish if they work together.
Liz’s influence on her daughters’ dreams and identities reinforces the depth of the mother-daughter bond. Mia and Cricket symbolically embody Liz’s influence through red ribbons, songs, and mantras. When Cricket wins an Olympic gold medal with Liz’s spirit by her side, she thinks about how their dream—not her dream, but theirs—is finally achieved. Some implications of the mother-daughter bond are clarified when Cricket’s fear that women are “doomed to repeat their mothers’ mistakes” proves unfounded (184). The relationship may create the potential for shared traits leading to shared fates, but it also creates opportunity for open communication and teaching moments, enabling Mia to learn from Liz’s mistakes and make better choices.
Mia and Cricket are very different from each other, yet their relationship shores them up through good and bad times alike. As they contemplate a future without their mother, sticking together is the foremost thing on their minds. Cricket’s plan “has always been to stay as close to Mia as her sister will allow” (124), suggesting something deeper than compatibility behind the sense that they have more strength in unity. After going 10 months without speaking to Cricket, Mia realizes that the rift with her sister is harming her more than her life-threatening kidney disease. This, too, implies there is something intrinsic and sustaining about their bond.
Through the novel’s epigraph, Dorey-Stein draws a connection between the Lowe women’s stories and the themes of Ada Limón’s poem, “Dead Stars.” In the poem, stars serve as a cosmic representation of the inevitability of death. Liz’s death forces Mia and Cricket to confront this, but just as a star’s light persists after its death, Liz’s presence persists in her daughters’ lives through memory and legacy. Mia and Cricket find ways to honor Liz as they grieve her loss, talking about her often and keeping her memory alive. By doing this together, they strengthen the bond of sisterhood that exists between them. When that’s not enough, Liz’s spirit appears to remind her daughters she’s still with them. Betty’s role in the final scene extends these familial bonds to another generation, demonstrating their enduring resonance.
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