“Maybe it’s a lie that you have to keep doing what you have always done. That you have to be able to draw a straight line from how you acted yesterday to how you’ll act tomorrow. You don’t have to be consistent. You can change, I think. Just because you want to.”

Carrie Soto is Back, by Taylor Jenkin Reid

Summary

By the time Carrie retires from tennis, she is the best player the world has ever seen. She has shattered every record and claimed twenty Slam titles. And if you ask her, she is entitled to every one. She sacrificed nearly everything to become the best, with her father as her coach.

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, British 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 a story about the cost of greatness and a legendary athlete attempting a comeback.

My Thoughts

This is my second ever 5 star read from Taylor Jenkin Reid, and by god is it worth it. I don’t care for sports except for the occasional Olympic sport, but this had me invested in sports like nothing else. I think that is because it uses its main sport, tennis, as a vehicle to tell the story. Like many of Reid’s books, it has a unique structure: a leadup, Carrie’s history, and then four main sections, each for a tournament (called an Open). Individual chapters include lead ups to the open, and then short chapters, hardly a page or two, breaking down Carrie’s actual matches. It reminds me a bit of the 2023 movie Challengers in that they both use tennis as the medium to tell a story, but the actual story is about the characters, not tennis.

Carrie Soto is one of my favorite Taylor Jenkin Reid protagonists. She reminds me a bit of Evelyn Hugo, but they are still distinct. She is ruthless and ambitious, driven to be the greatest in tennis. Her nickname is the “Battle Axe”, but she’s so cold and unfriendly to her opponents that newscasters blatantly call her a bitch. Her prickliness makes the few relationships she cultivates all the more powerful as a result. The juxtaposition of her coldness with Bowe and the way she slowly thaws out with him, slowly lets go of her fears of her heart being broken, and the softness of her relationship with her father are beautiful. Reid is not known for the healthiest of parent dynamics in her books, and while Javier and Carrie have their problems, there is a tenderness and love between them that I adore. Javier truly just wants to train Carrie, to see her succeed, for her to love every game and the play the best tennis she ever as. He calls her his Achilles. Yet, they also reckon with the weight of him telling Carrie she would be the greatest from a young age, of how she internalized that and grew up with a heavy set of expectations and ambitions for herself, and how her view of greatness wasn’t necessarily the same as his. One of my favorite dynamics in the book was that between Carrie and Nicki. They’re competitive and brutal, but there is also a strong sense of respect and understanding between them as they are both women of color navigating the field of tennis; not beautiful, or white enough to become models or icons in that way. Reid definitely drew upon the experiences of real tennis players like Serena and Venus Williams when writing this book, in my opinion, but Carrie and Nicki are still very much their own characters.

The book is one you cannot put down. The tension is a slow build and it pulls you in. While I could kind of tell what the end of the book would look like, I could not tell exactly how it would pan out, and I loved how it turned out in the end. This is a must-read, in my opinion.

Review: ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫

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