Spectacular Things Study Guide

Beck Dorey-Stein was born in Pennsylvania in 1986. She attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where she played lacrosse. After graduating from Wesleyan, Dorey-Stein taught high school English in New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and South Korea. From 2012 to 2017, she worked as a White House stenographer primarily during Barack Obama’s presidency, though also briefly during Donald Trump’s first term as president. For that job, she often traveled with the president on Air Force One. Dorey-Stein wrote a memoir about her experiences at the White House, titled From the Corner of the Oval, which was published in 2018. She went on to publish her first novel, Rock the Boat—about a group of friends who reunite in their hometown in New Jersey—in 2021. Spectacular Things, published in 2025, is Dorey-Stein’s third book and second novel. Dorey-Stein now lives in Maine. 

The central conflict in the novel centers on the question of whether Cricket, a star athlete, will give up her soccer career just as it’s beginning to donate a kidney to her sister, Mia. Dorey-Stein has said that part of the idea for that conflict came from the real-life story of track and field athlete Aries Merritt and his sister, LaToya Hubbard. Merritt won the 2012 Olympic gold medal for the 110-meter hurdles event. Shortly after, in 2013, Merritt’s kidneys began to fail. In 2015, Hubbard donated a kidney to him. After receiving that kidney donation, Merritt continued to compete as a hurdler. Dorey-Stein has said that when she thought about the characters of Mia and Cricket, she wondered what would happen if the situation were reversed. That is, if a star athlete’s sibling needed a kidney transplant, what would the athlete decide to do? Spectacular Things also centers on the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team and the 1999 and 2019 FIFA World Cups in particular. In 1999, the U.S. team won the World Cup after defeating China in the final. One of the leaders of that team was Mia Hamm, after whom Mia is named in the novel. In 2019, the U.S. team once again won the World Cup, this time defeating the Netherlands in the final. Two of the players of that team, Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe, are mentioned in Spectacular Things.

Spectacular Things is Dorey-Stein’s third book. Her first book is a memoir about her time working as a stenographer in the White House titled From the Corner of the Oval. Her second book is a novel titled Rock the Boat, which is about a group of friends who return to their coastal hometown in New Jersey. Spectacular Things, Dorey-Stein’s third book, takes place in a small town on the coast of Maine. Other books with similar settings include Linda Holmes’s novel Evvie Drake Starts Over and Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan. Spectacular Things begins with an epigraph that comes from a poem by 24th U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. The poem is titled “Dead Stars” and is included in Limón’s book The Carrying. Much of Spectacular Things centers on women’s professional soccer and on the U.S. Women’s National Team in particular. Caitlyn Murray’s 2018 nonfiction book The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women Who Changed Soccer provides an account of the Women’s National Team from the 1980s to the preparations for the 2019 World Cup. Liz, Mia, and Cricket attend the quarterfinals of that tournament in Spectacular Things. Megan Rapinoe, a former captain of the U.S. Women’s National Team who is mentioned in Spectacular Things, has also written a memoir, titled One Life.