CBR17 Book 65: "Carrie Soto is Back" by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Page count: 375 pages

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

#CBR11 Book 72: "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Page count: 400 pages
Audio book length: 12 hrs 10 mins
Rating: 4 stars

Earlier this year, Taylor Jenkins Reid published Daisy Jones and the Six, which has generally been very well received critically and keeps popping up on "Must read" lists. In several review of that book, I saw this, Jenkins Reid's previous release, from 2017, highly recommended. Several people who were so-so on Daisy Jones and the Six claimed to prefer The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and as movie stars seemed more intriguing to me than rock stars, I decided to give it a try.

There are multiple narratives in this book.There's the framing story of magazine journalist Monique Grant who is pretty much hand selected by legendary movie star Evelyn Hugo to come interview her and write her life's story, despite not having written much of worth previously. Neither Monique nor her editor understands entirely why Ms. Hugo is so adamant she will only speak to Monique. Then there's obviously the long and intricate story of Evelyn's life, broken up occasionally by glimpses into Monique's life outside of the interviews.

Living alone and heartbroken, after her husband left her to move to another city, Monique doesn't really feel that she's living her best life. Acclaimed and aging movie star Evelyn Hugo is donating some of her most famous gowns to a cancer charity, and the magazine Monique works for would like an interview and an accompanying photo shoot. Ms. Hugo refuses to speak to anyone but Monique (for reasons no one, least of all Monique herself can understand). It also turns out that she has no intention of posing for pictures or being portrayed in an interview. She wants to give Monique the exclusive rights to her life's story, to be sold to the highest bidder with Monique enjoying the subsequent profits. The catch - Monique can't publish the book until Ms Hugo is dead, and if she refuses the job, then Evelyn's long and juicy life's story will remain untold.

Monique realises that she may end up fired if she takes the job, and it could be years before she's allowed to publish the book, yet she doesn't feel she can say no either. So she keeps making excuses to her editor and comes daily to listen to Evelyn recount her biography.

While currently widowed, Evelyn Hugo famously had seven husbands during her long life, and both she and Monique knows that this is one of the many things the reading public will want to know about. Who exactly was the love of Evelyn's life? How did she go from being a poor young girl in Hell's Kitchen to becoming an award winning and critically acclaimed international movie star, with a career spanning about half a century.

Evelyn is clearly a fascinating and deeply driven individual, who has used every resource available to her to achieve stardom. More than once, she trades sexual favours for advancement. She plays on her stunning looks and bombshell body, yet clearly possesses a razor sharp mind and frequently uses the preconceptions people and the movie industry have about her to become a star and further her career. Some of her marriages were made from genuine affection, others were highly practical affairs. Some lasted years, some mere days. Yet her winding narrative contains several secrets that ensure that the book that Monique has the potential to write will be an instant bestseller.

The mystery at the heart of the book, which isn't answered until the very last part of the book, is exactly what the connection between Evelyn Hugo and Monique Grant is, and why Evelyn was adamant that she would only tell her story to this particular younger woman. By the time it was revealed, I wasn't all that surprised, or that I cared all that much about the answer.

While I liked this book quite a lot more than Daisy Jones and the Six (films and the movie industry was always going to be more my wheelhouse than the music business), there is no denying that the sections of the book with Monique were a lot less interesting to me than the sections about Evelyn and I kept speeding up the audio book to get through them faster. I simply didn't care why she broke up with her husband or whether they'd get back together, nor was I particularly worried about her career. Evelyn, while not necessarily "nice", had a long, complicated and fascinating life and was infinitely more enjoyable to me.

Judging a book by its cover: There are two covers for this novel, both featuring what I'm assuming is Evelyn in her signature green. I much prefer this version of the cover, with Evelyn lying down, only her lips and a tiny bit of her hair showing. The one where she stands up is more traditional and not as evocative, in my opinion. This cover is sexier, and for a book that involves so many details about a star's love life, that seems appropriate.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR11 Book 68: "Daisy Jones and the Six" by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Page count: 368 pages
Audio book length: 9 hrs 3 mins
Rating: 4 stars

From Goodreads:
Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity . . . until now.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.

Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.

Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

This is one of those books I've seen on pretty much all "Must Read" lists of books from 2019, and absolutely everyone seems very taken with it. Personally, I thought the book was entertaining, but if it hadn't been for the excellent work of the ensemble cast performing the audio book (including, among them, the wonderful Judy Greer), this would have easily been a three star book for me. Maybe it's just that I'm not all that interested in musicians and how music gets made?

Obviously, this is a fictional account of a famous musical collaboration, and every time I read about the book before I got the audio book for myself, it seemed like something my husband would really enjoy. He has wide and varied music tastes and buys and reads music magazines. With certain artists, he loves to listen to countless early versions of songs (or different live versions) that to me don't really sound all that different. Having been with my husband for nearly twenty years now, I've learned to tune a lot of music out, and even songs that I've probably heard hundreds of times, I can't necessarily remember the lyrics of, because I just don't really listen to the words. I certainly don't care much about how the music is played, or produced or mixed, as long as it sounds agreeable to me. Having now listened to the book, I'm still sure that he'd enjoy it more than I did - as he probably knows more about the sort of musical tradition it's fictionalising.

So I'm really not the target audience for this book, I think. I also found Daisy Jones annoying and spoiled for much of the book, while Billy Dunne was an arrogant, rather self-involved macho douche. What made me like the book at all were the supporting characters, and as I've already mentioned, that the various voice actors performing the audio book (seriously, there's like at least 20 different people involved) did an absolutely superb job. This is the first of two books by Ms. Jenkins Reid that I've listened to in audio book (I'm so far behind on my reviews again, you guys) and I much preferred the second, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. 

Judging a book by its cover: I'm going to guess that the red-headed woman on the cover is supposed to be Daisy, and can only say that based on the descriptions of her in the book, they either had a very different beauty standard in the 60s and 70s, or the publishing company could have tried to find a prettier cover model. I can only imagine that the book cover is meant to evoke one of the album covers of the fictional band this book covers, but I don't particularly like the image and think they should have picked something better for the cover.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.