This…wasn’t it for me? And I’ll get into why shortly. Be warned that this contains a LOT of rambling about tennis. If you’re not into that, this review is unlikely to be for you, and that’s totally fine. I focus on why it didn’t totally work for me, but I didn’t hate it. This is opinion, not an objective statement on whether this book is good or not or whether you should read it (you should!)
There’s a few very general, vague, thematic and plot spoilers below: depending on your spoiler sensitivity, you may want to skip this review entirely.

But first I should describe what I admired about the book, and there’s a lot to admire. Carrie is one of the most difficult, selfish, ruthless, and “unlikable” women MCs I’ve read in awhile. She does not hold back from speaking her mind, or from being ambitious/mean without reservation: I was super impressed by the character boldness. This book is staggeringly efficient in packing an entire tennis career into one succinct novel, though its stylistic brevity is one of the reasons I couldn’t quite get immersed. The overall arc of Carrie’s journey: learning to enjoy the game in the moment rather than panicking over results from an egotistic impulse, learning to lose graciously, finding perspective on her own accomplishments despite inevitably falling short of perfection, admiring her rivals sincerely instead of hating them actually, and acknowledging her human limits when figuring out how to win, are all conveyed lovingly and respectfully. I did like where we arrived with her journey.

In Carrie Soto, I ran into that mental stumbling block where, when it comes to tales about niche interests, I want to feel completely immersed in that passion. For this to happen, I need to feel the character’s enthusiasm for the thing in terms of the sensory pleasure it gives them, in terms of their brain’s obsession with arcane facts and details about it; or in they way they talk about their obsession to others. And TJR’s writing style, here at least, was so minimal and cursory that I lacked that immersion in another person’s passion. Yes, there’s references to achy calves, sweat, and tiredness, but the blow-by-blow descriptions of points just weren’t visceral enough to pull me into geeking out over imaginary beautiful tennis.

While I didn’t jive with the writing style, the player mentality it conveys: a driven overachiever who only cares about winning, who communicates to the reader in pared-down facts rather than emotional nuance, feels realistic. When Carrie’s superstar coach quits on her for a younger star player, Carrie subsequently retires, then eventually returns to her first coach, her father. The doubters of her ability are always on the outside. Her job is to hype herself and silence the unbelievers in any way she can. For a long time, that requires her father to performatively echo the exact validation she needs to hear (and I did appreciate that the book went there, showing some of the cost of this mindset to Carrie’s relationship with her father). And because Carrie has this mentality, pushing away all doubts and fears to the realm of other people’s concerns, she can pull off the results she does, becoming a competitive athlete again at 37 years old.

But tennis is often weirder than fiction. I’m the most dilettante-ish of fans: I’ve been watching very casually since the early 2000s, in time to watch both Goran Ivanisevic’s wildcard Cinderella run at Wimbledon in 2001, and Carlos Alcaraz’s recent breakthrough as the U.S. Open’s first teenage winner, a few weeks ago. I’m sure someone watching more closely could school me on many tennis idiosyncrasies I don’t know. But I do know a few things about how totally fucking weird tennis players can be. And while there are players like “I never doubted myself” Djokovic, about whom it is said that he first takes his rival’s “legs, then their souls,” there’s also Federer, who believe it or not, used to be deemed too emotionally unstable to reliably win in the early 2000s. Until he relegated his tears and emotional breakdowns to after wins/losses rather than during them, and, along the way, became one of the winningest of all time.

There’s Nadal, who has externalized all his nerves into a series of elaborate pre-serve and changeover rituals, without which he cannot function (but with which he’s the king of the French open). If you’ve seen him, you’ve seen him obsessively order his water bottles by the changeover chair, losing his shit if anyone else touches them. And you’ve seen his pre-serve ritual: he’ll straighten his shorts, wipe his eyebrows, his nose, bounce the ball until the very last second of the shot clock, and then…. win. Win a lot. For him, it works. Then there’s Medvedev, who physically looks like he got lost on his way to a chess tournament rather than being an elite athlete. He gets visibly upset by people cheering on his defeat, or at least, he used to, and he’s not afraid of showing it. He once taunted an hostile U.S. Open crowd during a victory speech, sarcastically saying that their love and support helped him win on that day, which was met by a chorus of boos, which seemed to amuse him. And then the next match he played, the crowd decided they actually loved him, and he got to use that same line unironically, which was one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever witnessed.

There’s Kyrgios, who, on his way out of the 2022 US Open, shouted to his box that he bet this final set was going to be 6-0 in favour of his opponent, almost like he was externalizing the threat of his defeat so he could share the agony of doubt instead of suffering alone. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone more naturally talented than Kyrgios. And he’s right there, at the top level of the sport, so close to winning grand slams. His brain is obviously something he must deal with, just like some other players must deal with lack of height, lack of crosscourt agility, or poor net instincts. But tennis is weird, is what I’m saying. It’s weird, success in tennis often looks weird, and the way people cope with it is also weird, far weirder than it is in this book.

But this is women’s tennis we’re talking about in Carrie Soto – and the winningest champion of all time, Serena Williams, also has something other than this “I was raised to be the greatest of all time and ruthlessly pursued that goal from a young age” arc. The triumphs Serena has experienced, winning the most slams of anyone, ever, are in parallel to those accomplished by the book’s character Nikki Chan, Carrie Soto’s rival. Serena wasn’t raised to be the greatest of all time she now is, as Carrie is in this book. Her sister Venus was the one who received the all-star coach from a young age, not her. Their dad famously delayed their entry into tennis, in the hopes that they’d have perspective on the sport instead of emotional breakdowns when they didn’t win immediately, the kind he saw all the time at the tennis club where he worked, inflicted on kids by their parents. In the early 2000s after they’d broken out and dominated the sport, the Williams sisters garnered endless criticism for trying to be well-rounded individuals, pursuing fashion design and French lessons alongside tennis, not playing all the run-up tournaments to the Grand Slams, with doubters saying they lacked the complete devotion to the game supposedly necessary for continued success. And today, Serena has had THE winningest and one of the longest careers in tennis history. It’s very likely because she did have some balance in her life, and perspective on tennis as one passionate interest among others that could be sustained through her entire life, not just her athletic youth.

So what I was missing was this kind of tennis-nerd zeal, of all the idiosyncrasies, personalities, individual choices, differences in demeanour and varied approaches to the game that make the sport surprising, entertaining, unbelievable (TM Nadal) and other than archetypal. Carrie Soto seemed a bit like the type of generic sports-hero story you’d assume existed if you didn’t have a lot of IRL tennis players and their quirks in their heads.

Backing up for a second, I want to acknowledge that not every story about a niche interest has to be about the particularities of that niche in “accurate” detail. That’s not always a story’s intention, and I don’t think it’s CSIB’s intention as a story, either: it’s using tennis as a framework to talk about pursuit of excellence. By way of example, I know a fair bit about elite music schools thanks to a relative who has graduated a highly-regarded program. I knew that none of what happened in the movie Whiplash, for example, was strictly realistic in terms of how elite music schools are run. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying that Whiplash was trying to tell a particular story about extreme levels of egotism and privilege certain people who are pursuing greatness can maintain, where “greatness” is the Machiavellian excuse for cruelty and selfishness. Those sorts of stories operate by an internal logic that doesn’t have much to do with IRL precedents. Not everything needs to be The Queen’s Gambit, beloved by the game’s insider nerds and appealing to outsiders for the passion it conveys about the field. Even if us non-chess types have the majority of play details fly right over our heads.

But Carrie Soto is neither Whiplash nor the Queen’s Gambit? It’s not a devoted explainer of tennis’s idiosyncrasies for the masses. It IS a tale of tennis-as-metaphor for character journey, but it’s not fantastical, setting up an alt-world logic. And that made it feel…predictable, less in an anticipatory way than an obvious way. I couldn’t stop calculating the likely plot points it would hit, as though I was playing percentage tennis with the story arc. I was like, oh, I bet (this result) will happen in the early majors to give us obstacles to overcome, and then (this other result) will happen in this foreshadowed important tournament for Carrie, and then there will be this (final showdown) and then the lessons about (personal growth and acceptance) will come home to roost. And…that all happened? And it was okay enough? Mildly enjoyable? I guess?

I felt like we didn’t delve into anyone’s weirdness or flaws sufficiently for my tastes?

Like, Carrie is emotionally about 14 years old in this book. Needing parental reassurance constantly while she’s also willing to ditch her dad/coach when it serves her needs. Carrie needs to be in control of all her relationships, to be the one rejecting men instead of vice versa. She needs to win at everything, or she feels furious, vengeful, and worthless. And I think it’s likely this selfish mentality would have hurt a lot of people around her in ways probably more devastating than the impacts we see on-page: if she’s a bad bitch, make her a bad bitch who is confronted with the consequences of how she affects others, is my take. She’s basically an outcast who the press treats with disdain, but she has few existing relationships to demonstrate how she’s been cruel to others. There’s no interpersonal beef she really mourns as a learning experience, and she also has no real regrets about her lack of closeness to anyone besides her father.

In Bowe, the once and future boyfriend, we do get a glimpse of somebody who was hurt by Carrie’s callousness, who also has to prove he’s going to be emotionally there for her despite that. Come hell, high water, or Carrie’s observational cruelty about his mediocre capabilities in the sport compared to her own dominance. Which…Carrie isn’t mistaken to point this out, or anything. I just felt that it was a bit of a story investment problem that Bowe came across so blandly that I didn’t really care whether his feelings were hurt by her. She actually avoids Bowe when he loses an important match, wanting to focus on herself and her own upcoming big match. And her emotional breakthrough is changing that habit, staying for him at a critical time when she SHOULD be focusing on herself, when Old Carrie would have up and left. So, good for her. By the end of the novel, she’s achieved basic respect for her fellow players and her partner that they were already owed, that she should have given them if she were slightly more emotionally mature. I guess I was more interested in studying her character’s flaws in a fascinated way, than bringing her up to a level of human decency through the plot?

For most of this book, Bowe was a man-shaped entity on the horizon who was somehow destined to be with Carrie because he was flawed in a similar way, who respected her as an equal. They both have tempers, they are both the wild bad boys/girls of tennis, they are both mounting pre-retirement comebacks nobody believes are a good idea besides themselves. But their relationship lacked conflict about anything that mattered (since they are only hard on each other within a tennis framework, otherwise reinforcing and validating each other) and as a result, their relationship didn’t produce much personal growth for either. I was far more interested in Carrie’s frenemy relationship with Nikki Chan, which had considerably more sparks of every kind, romantic and platonic. Nikki is the one to call Carrie to account for her emotional immaturity, with the lack of respect she affords Nikki, when Nikki has graciously made it clear how much Carrie’s career means to her own success. Nikki forced Carrie to grow more in that moment than any of her interactions with Bowe.

In Javier, Carrie’s coach/Dad, we get this portrait of an ultimately caring, rather than toxic, stage parent, who loves his kid more than he lives through her. Sure, he’s released one of those “I coached an all-time great” books on the back of her career, and a lot of the book’s final act is a vindication of him as an all-time great coach, with his involvement with Bowe’s current training. But I almost can’t believe that a parent-child and athlete-coach relationship can coast along as it did, after Carrie had previously left him for a more ambitious coach, without more tumult. Or at least external pressure: when they don’t immediately get the results Carrie wants, do either of them start to doubt, or disagree on the future direction of the work they have to do? And how do they get beyond that as a team and as father/daughter? Has Javier ever been actually wrong – it seems like it, with his lack of willingness to push Carrie’s game to a more risk-taking style in her career peak? How do they work through those things as impactful, acknowledging those difficult experiences together, instead of him donning the Coach hat and Carrie acquiescing to his entire plan, which is right for her because he loves her? (obviously, people can love you a lot and also be wrong about what you need: and Javier has already experienced this exact phenomenon).

I wanted more emotional complexity and productive interpersonal conflict than a character like Carrie was ever going to give us. This book makes a big deal out of the lesson that even if we lose, it was all worth it. But I think the especially cruel thing about elite sports is that you CAN do everything right, you can be brilliant, and you can still never actually reach the top of the game or stay there as long as you may think you deserve. We are also used to lessons only coming from life’s winners, rather than its losers, no matter how true those lessons may be.

In the early 2000s, Pete Sampras was desperately trying to win the French Open, the one slam at which he’d never succeeded. Thanks to years of extreme overtraining, which used to involve entire days of conditioning followed by long bouts of drills and gameplay, he possessed greatly diminished stamina when he was only in his early 30s. It was almost painful to watch him drop out in the first week of challenger tournaments because his proliferate aces did not offset his struggles with long rallies. Commentators were absolutely atrocious to him about it. Saying he was embarrassing himself, ruining his legacy (this is also what commentators say about Carrie in this book) and should retire. Carrie’s training regimen, with all the early morning runs followed by hours and hours of hitting daily, is kind of Sampras-like. And this is the training she’s done since her youth. Yes, acknowledging her match stamina issues are a significant plot point. Yet by the end of the tournament she’s looking forward to the ADVANTAGE she feels she has in longer matches. As though her will to work harder and longer will result in its due reward. Which…okay, for fiction, that can be a satisfying message, and probably a helpful one to broader success in life. I just have a hard time believing it, because I’ve seen so many times where it isn’t true.

Sampras had a swan-song run at the US Open, meeting and end-of-career Andre Agassi in the final in 20002. Sampras won, after which he retired from the sport. It was the send-off he deserved: it was magical, it was satisfying, it made all those painful French Open attempts somehow not matter in the least. It would be hard to believe it were true, rather than scripted, if it hadn’t actually happened.

And sports has that effect. It persuades us to accept the unbelievable by the fact that it happened, and it retcons the difficult moments as paving the way to an ultimate validation of personal greatness by a proven winner. They are a realm in which the past has a meaning that’s always being reinterpreted and reimagined by present results: lose too much, and your accomplishments don’t mean the same thing as they once did, as Carrie Soto’s story reminds us. This fluidity is maybe the closest thing to a living oral history as we can get in the digital age. And that’s what I’m interested in: the ways in which our most human moments, doubting and fearful and uncertain, are somehow irreconcilable with our transcendent ones, to the extent that we will reconsider an athlete’s legacy if they prove a bit too human in their present results, not just their courtside quirks.

I do like the ending of Carrie Soto, in which she’s finally set those legacy fears aside, made her peace with not (always) winning, and found joy in the present. I guess I’m mostly interested in how dark we can go with those irreconcilable human flaws – selfishness, egotism, stubbornness – when we already have the assurance that Carrie’s tale is the kind we tell about winners.