Audio book length: 10hrs 29mins
Rating: 4 stars
Nowhere Bingo 25: A book about sport
CBR17 Bingo: Play (tennis)
Official plot summary (finished the book in August):
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.
I'm not a big fan of sports, of any kind. I don't like doing any personally, and I don't really find them interesting to watch. There are exceptions, but my enjoyment usually comes from the excitement of the others watching with me, rather than from the actual athletic feats taking place on screen. I have vague memories of watching some televised tennis tournaments as a child, because my parents watched them, but I don't think I've ever, as an adult, thought: I should make sure to watch some tennis. Despite all this, I did really enjoy the movie Challengers, and that is part of what made me curious about this book.
That was a very long-winded way of saying that it shows what a talented and engaging writer Taylor Jenkins Reid is (or possibly how good the cast reading the audiobook is), because I ended up giving this book 4 stars. Just as I had very little personal knowledge of the music scene (and the personal drama of Fleetwood Mac) described in Daisy Jones and the Six, my own personal knowledge of the professional tennis scene is limited. I know who Serena Williams is (I'm pretty sure you'd have to have been living in a cave for the past few decades not to have at least heard of her), and she and her staggeringly impressive tennis career are clearly one of the inspirations for this book, and its protagonist.
To be honest, the first part of the book, where we are given an overview of Carrie's early life and her single-minded determination to become the greatest tennis player in the world, was less interesting to me than the second part, where we follow her after she decides to make her unlikely comeback. Carrie is called "the battle axe" by a lot of people for a lot of her career. Once she decides to make her comeback, a lot of commentators nickname her the b-word, because obviously, misogyny is alive and well in the world, and women can never be allowed to be as successful (or better than) men, without being called any number of unflattering things, and being seen as arrogant, unattractive and unwomanly.
I don't agree that these are appropriate things to call any woman, but because of her extreme single-mindedness and refusal to let anything but her ruthless ambition become part of her life for so long, Carrie's not exactly a very likeable person, and I thought she was mean and unreasonable to her dad, who devotes his life to training her and helping her become the best, even as he worries that she has nothing else in her life to live for. She doesn't always make good choices, and she's so arrogant that it's hard to really sympathise with her for a lot of the book. In the second half, when she is older and has suffered injuries and disappointments in her career, as well as in her personal life, she actually has some genuine character development and begins to reevaluate her life choices and her dreams for the future. It was only then that I actually felt interested in whether or not she would succeed.
I don't want to spoil the ending, but my ideal version of this would have been less focused on her early life and achievements, and instead continuing the book for a few years after the end of this one, to see where Carrie eventually ended up, both professionally and personally. I really liked her developing friendship with younger rival Nicki Chan, and was sad to not get more time to see where that friendship took both of them.
I think that by now, I'm just going to accept that I prefer Taylor Jenkins Reid books in audio, and continue to consume them that way.
Judging a book by its cover: As is often the case, this book comes with a lot of different covers, but this one, which also accompanies my audio version, is my favourite. The golden background and the cover model portraying Carrie raising her head in triumph (or exhaustion) really works for me, and embodies the vibe of the book really well.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read
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