She Stakes In Her Head
Nyah has always skated long before she ever touched ice. Born and raised in Guyana, where ice rinks don’t exist and dreams like hers are treated as impractical fantasies, she learns to skate in her head instead. Every glide, every jump, every victory is imagined with brutal precision. It is the only place where she feels free. The only place where the noise inside her quiets.
At eighteen , carrying years of unspoken trauma, depression, and a body already familiar with survival, Nyah makes the impossible choice to leave home in pursuit of a dream that has no guarantees. In a foreign country and an unforgiving sport, talent alone isn’t enough. The ice demands more than skill , it demands endurance, restraint, and a willingness to be seen without armor.
As injuries, doubt, and emotional fractures threaten to undo her, Nyah must confront a harder truth: chasing greatness can become another way of disappearing. Between brutal training, fragile friendships, and the constant pull of old darkness, she begins to learn that survival and ambition are not the same and that wanting more always comes with a cost.
She Skated in Her Head is an intimate, painful, and unflinching novel about dreams born in impossible places, the violence of self-expectation, and the quiet courage it takes to stay alive long enough to become something real. This is not a story about winning. It is a story about staying.
