Why You'll Love This
Carrie Soto is not here to be liked — she's here to win back what's hers, and that single-mindedness is impossible to look away from.
- Great if you want: a fierce, flawed woman refusing to accept her ceiling
- The experience: propulsive and emotionally taut — the comeback tension never lets up
- The writing: Reid structures the drama in tight, punchy chapters that keep the stakes escalating
- Skip if: you need a likable protagonist — Carrie is deliberately abrasive
About This Book
Carrie Soto has spent her entire life becoming the greatest tennis player who ever lived — and she has the records to prove it. When a rising star threatens to erase her legacy from the history books, Carrie does the unthinkable: she comes out of retirement at thirty-seven to take back what she believes is rightfully hers. This is a story about ambition without apology, about a woman who refuses to be likable and refuses to be forgotten, and about the aching, complicated love between a daughter and the father who shaped her into something extraordinary and difficult.
Taylor Jenkins Reid writes Carrie Soto with the same electric specificity she brings to all her larger-than-life characters — someone who feels genuinely invented rather than assembled from familiar parts. The novel moves with the propulsive rhythm of a match itself: tight, tense, driven by momentum. Reid structures the story across a single comeback season, which gives the book a focused intensity that longer, sprawling narratives rarely achieve. Readers who want to inhabit a fully realized, morally complicated woman at her absolute limits will find plenty to sink into here.
