Blurb from Goodreads:
Carrie Soto is fierce, and her determination to win at any cost has not made her popular. But by the time she retires from tennis, she is the best player the world has ever seen. She has shattered every record and claimed twenty Grand Slam titles. And if you ask Carrie, she is entitled to every one. She sacrificed nearly everything to become the best, with her father, Javier, as her coach. A former champion himself, Javier has trained her since the age of two.
But six years after her retirement, Carrie finds herself sitting in the stands of the 1994 US Open, watching her record be taken from her by a brutal, stunning player named Nicki Chan.
At thirty-seven years old, Carrie makes the monumental decision to come out of retirement and be coached by her father for one last year in an attempt to reclaim her record. Even if the sports media says that they never liked “the Battle-Axe” anyway. Even if her body doesn’t move as fast as it did. And even if it means swallowing her pride to train with a man she once almost opened her heart to: Bowe Huntley. Like her, he has something to prove before he gives up the game forever.
In spite of it all, Carrie Soto is back, for one epic final season. In this riveting and unforgettable novel, Taylor Jenkins Reid tells her most vulnerable, emotional story yet.
I haven’t updated this blog in far, far too long. This is partly because I haven’t really been reading very regularly and partly because, and I don’t mind saying this, 2022 has been a year. I haven’t achieved most of what I set out to do this year and when I look back at what has happened to me, near me or at me this year, well. It’s been a struggle. I am, of course, desperately grateful to my friends even if I’m constantly terrified that I am boring them or dragging them down. So yeah, buried in this book review is an apology to my friends.
The first Taylor Jenkins Reid book that I read was The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and I genuinely loved it. The really clever thing about her books, which are, in the broadest sense, about the lives of fictional celebrities, is that they all tie in together. An affair mentioned in Malibu Rising features in this book, and Daisy Jones and the Six crops up, which itself referred to characters in Evelyn Hugo. There’s no particular need to read every book, although I recommend them, but they are neat Easter eggs.
For some reason (probably the myriad of reasons that have slowed me down this year), it took me a while to get into this book. I have carried it from Ireland to Canada to Portugal. It is a well-traveled novel.
As explained by the blurb, Carrie Soto is a formidable tennis player with not a whole lot by way of interpersonal skills. Often, this kind of heroine makes it really difficult for me to get into a book, but Carrie really grew on me. Nicknamed ‘The Battle-Axe’ or sometimes ‘The Bitch’, she is making a comeback in professional tennis, determined to regain her record of most Grand Slam titles and, honestly, for the first half of the book I couldn’t decide if I wanted her to succeed or not, and for the second half, I couldn’t figure out if she would succeed or not. This book was just unpredictable enough to keep me going, and was helped along by some very delightful secondary characters, including Carrie’s father, Javier, and her love interest, Bowe Huntley, who’s on a redemption arc of his own. The first-person narration is broken up by newspaper and media excerpts to good effect, and I definitely enjoyed the descriptions of tennis. (An aside: I was an avid tennis fan as a teenager, and A Handful of Summers and Too Soon To Panic , by Gordon Forbes, a South African tennis player, in the 1950s and 60s, were two books that stayed with me.)
Carrie Soto is a very typical Taylor Jenkins Reid book, even if I struggled a bit at the start. I invariably reach a point where I want to know what happens next and I love that I couldn’t call the ending. I was delighted by the final chapter. Her relationship with her father is special, and her interactions with other tennis players tend to be highly entertaining. I’m not sure I would root for Carrie in real life, but, by the end of the novel I liked her just fine, and I enjoyed reading about her path to accepting who and what she is.
Rating: 4 stars
TL;DR: Former pro tennis player makes the comeback no one admits they want to see and maybe the real championship was the friends she made along the way…
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