The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Toews, Miriam. Fight Night. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.

The novel is narrated by eight-year-old Swiv, as a letter to her absent father. In Part One, she is living in Toronto with her grandmother, Elvira, and her mother, Mooshie, who is pregnant with a baby they call Gord. Swiv has been expelled from school for fighting, and Elvira is homeschooling her, teaching eccentric lessons like “How to Dig a Winter Grave” (9). Elvira is eccentric herself, but also kind and generous. She recently gave her sweatpants to a man experiencing homelessness. She lost both her husband and daughter, Swiv's Aunt Momo, to suicide. She says that she survived the grief by asking herself, “Who can I help” (15). Mooshie, meanwhile, is frequently angry, presumably because she is a pregnant single mother trying to make ends meet as an actress.

Swiv accompanies Elvira to a restaurant where she is meeting a friend and listens to the two women talking about “assisted dying” (35). Swiv explains that Elvira grew up in a small community of Russian immigrant Mennonites, ruled over by the church leader, a tyrannical man named Willit Braun. She was the youngest of 14 children, and at age eight, she was responsible for shoveling coal into the home's heater. As a teenager, she attended Bible school in the U.S. after her mother died, then returned to her hometown and met and married Swiv's grandfather.

One morning, Swiv wakes to find that Elvira has fallen in the kitchen. Elvira takes this in stride, laughing as Swiv helps her up. As Elvira convalesces, Swiv asks her why Mooshie is “so weird,” to which Elvira responds, “[She] is a fighter on every front” (59). Swiv knows that Mooshie is “afraid of losing her mind and killing herself” (60), but Elvira tells her this is not going to happen. The next day, Swiv and Mooshie go for a walk together, and Mooshie tells Swiv, “We need teams. We need others to fight alongside us” (71). She uses Swiv and Elvira's favorite sports team, the Toronto Raptors, as an example of teamwork.

The family has been writing letters to one another at the behest of a family therapist. Swiv asks Elvira to write a letter to Gord. In the letter, Elvira tells Gord, “You're a small thing and you must learn to fight” (79). Later, she asks Mooshie to write to Gord as well. Mooshie's letter contains expressions of grief about the death of her sister, Momo, anger toward men, and an account of a dream Mooshie had about being in a mental hospital. The letter distresses Swiv, so she hides it in the back of her closet. The next day, she asks Elvira, “What happens to a kid if everyone in her family is insane?” (95).

Elvira tells Swiv that she needs to go to Scarborough to visit her hairdresser because she is planning to take a trip to Fresno, California to visit her nephews. She asks Swiv to book her an airline ticket for the trip. When Mooshie comes home that night, she agrees to let Elvira go, but only if Swiv accompanies her. On the bus to Scarborough, Mooshie embarrasses Swiv by yelling at some men who will not give up their seats.

In Part 2, Swiv and Elvira go to the airport. They are seated on the tarmac for some time because the plane is having “mechanical problems” (136). Swiv begins to have a panic attack, and Elvira tells her a story to distract her. A few months after Momo's death, she explains, Mooshie went to Albania to film a movie. She was grieving, and also anxious about her own mental health. During this time, Swiv was alone with her father, who was drinking heavily. Mooshie had an affair with a crew member, and nearly died while filming a scene in which her character drowns. Elvira believes this was something of a rebirth experience for Mooshie. When she returned, she told Swiv's father about the affair and he left her. She later discovered she was pregnant, but Swiv's father did not believe the baby was his. She briefly checked herself into a mental hospital. Elvira declares that the people in her hometown, such as Willit Braun, robbed her and Mooshie of their souls, and that they “fight” (160) to regain everything that was taken from them. Swiv's panic attack abates.

In Fresno, Swiv meets Elvira's nephews, two “old hippies” (167) named Ken and Lou. The group takes a boat out onto a lake, and Swiv worries that the adults will become too intoxicated from the wine they are drinking and she will have to drive the boat. Later, Swiv and Elvira take Ken's car to a nursing home so Elvira can visit some friends and family. Elvira falls at the nursing home and breaks her arm. Swiv attempts to drive the car home, but it repeatedly stalls. A teenager stops to help them and drives the car back to Ken's house. It is decided that Elvira and Swiv should return to Canada immediately, because her health insurance is not valid in the U.S.

When they return, Elvira is barely conscious, having suffered a heart attack, and she is taken on a stretcher to the hospital. Mooshie meets them at the hospital. Elvira is transferred to intensive care and Mooshie goes into labor. Swiv runs back and forth between her grandmother and mother. After Mooshie delivers Gord, who is a girl, and falls asleep, Swiv tucks the baby into her backpack and takes her to see Elvira. At her request, Elvira's breathing tube has been removed. Mooshie arrives, looking for Swiv and the baby. She tells Elvira that it is okay for her to pass on, that she and Swiv and Gord will be fine. She says she will name Gord after her. In the final chapter, Swiv remembers all of the important lessons her grandmother taught her and reads Gord the letter Elvira wrote to her.