Julia's Bookshelves

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• Page Count: 400
• Genre: Historical fiction, sports fiction, literary fiction

“They can’t make us go away just because they are done with us” – Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

An intense and technical dive into the world of competitive tennis, Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid surprised me. I’ve reviewed TJR books before, including One True Loves, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and my personal favorite Daisy Jones and the Six. TJR is a master at detailed world-building, and the characters and politics imagined in Carrie Soto Is Back do not disappoint. The story follows Carrie Soto, a tennis legend who has claimed twenty slam titles in her historic career. She is fearless, ruthless, and will do what ever it takes to reach her goal of being the best tennis player in the world.

Sx years into retirement, Carrie is satisfied to leave her intense training and competition lifestyle in the past. That is until she finds her records overtaken by the talented tennis star Nicki Chan. At thirty-seven, Carrie’s odds of making a successful comeback to reclaim her record are slim. She’ll have to resume training with her father and learn how to achieve greatness in her changed body. But Carrie has never backed down from an impossible challenge. Carrie Soto launches a legendary comeback.

There’s a lot of heart in this book. Carrie isn’t well liked in the tennis world, and she’s a very rough-around-the-edges character. Her whole life is tracked towards greatness, and readers witness firsthand how the world treats ambitious and talented women.

Carrie Soto eats, sleeps, and breathes tennis, and so this entire book focuses on the sport. A lot of reviews that I’ve read about this book have talked about the match sequences being too technical or boring, but as a tennis player myself, I quite enjoyed the play-by-plays of Carrie’s matches. It was fun to visualize this greatness in my head, but I also know that my baseline understanding of the game definitely benefited me and my reading experience. To be clear, I was an extremely novice tennis player in high school and Carrie Soto would crush me like a bug on the court quite quickly. But still, I do think that playing or watching tennis will make this book more entertaining for me, and I can understand how having no tennis background would make understanding long sequences of Carrie Soto a challenge.

The treatment of ambitious women in both sports culture and beyond is nothing new, and it was watching the media’s treatment of Carrie Soto during her rise that really kept me hooked. There’s a sense that Carrie isn’t nice enough, that she’s too serious, and that she’s just overly brutal. While she was raised to be a cutthroat and ambitious player and that definitely led to some character flaws, overall, Carrie’s vilification in the story comes from the tension created about women rising up as strong, serious, and athletic in a patriarchal society. TJR commits to Carrie’s intense nature so much that it might be uncomfortable for some readers, but I found Carrie to be an admirably complex and compelling character. She might not be well liked by broadcasters, but I was rooting for Carrie Soto.

The book is filled with interviews, articles, and commentary on Carrie Soto that repeatedly bash her character. Taylor Jenkins Reid throws a few killer lines into Carrie Soto Is Back to show Carrie’s understanding of her position, my favorites including “one of the great injustices of this rigged world we live in is that women are considered to be depleting with age and men are somehow deepening” and “Some men’s childhoods are permitted to last forever, but women are so often reminded that there is work to be done.” There’s a constant interrogation of the climate in women’s sports, especially a sport like tennis, which is historically played by the wealthy elite.

All Carrie strives for is to be the best tennis player in the world. But what makes winning matter? Is it personal satisfaction? Respect of peers? What do we get out of it? Carrie Soto explores a life built on expectations of greatness, and what personal costs come with an insatiable hunger to always be the best. For women who have been called “too much” or “too serious,” especially women in the world of sports, Carrie’s journey will likely hit home. I’m admittedly not a huge reader of sports fiction, but Carrie Soto has endeared me to the genre.