Stuff I've Read: Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

A titan of women’s tennis retires after attaining every major record in the sport.  The GOAT conversation starts and ends with her.  But when someone threatens to break one of her records, she decides the only way to protect her legacy is to come out of retirement and reclaim her spot at the top of the mountain.  The great ones never truly go away in Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2022 novel, Carrie Soto is Back.

Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Set in the mid-1990s, Carrie Soto is Back follows Carrie, who at the beginning of the book retires from a sport she’s fallen out of love with as its greatest champion ever.  She’s brash, prickly, driven, confident, and ruthless on the court.  While that combination of traits fueled her greatness, it also garnered a media-fueled reputation of being… difficult.  Outside the sport, though, she’s lonely and somewhat insecure.  Her circle is small, consisting primarily of her father/coach Javi (also a retired tennis legend) and her long-suffering agent, Gwen.  Having been defined by tennis—and her greatness on the circuit—for her entire adult life, when she leaves, Carrie finds herself directionless.  That is, until a younger athlete starts closing in on some of her records.  Nicki Chan has declared war on Carrie’s legacy, and her only recourse is to return—at the age of 37—for one final season.  Doing that means two things Carrie doesn’t look forward to: reuniting with her coach/father (and confronting the difficulties of being raised by a distant parent while having that parent be one of the handful of people who truly understands you), and training alongside someone else.  Enter Bowe Huntley, a past-his-prime former champion trying to prove he’s got something left in the tank.

There’s a lot to like here, and I’ll start with Carrie Soto herself.  She’s a deeply layered protagonist, a perfectionist who demands a lot of herself and suffers no fools.  It would have been easy to lean into Carrie’s perceived arrogance and channel that into overtly self-destructive behavior.  News and fiction both are littered with stories of people with superstar abilities that become so assured of their greatness that they spiral into any number of vices.  Carrie’s not that, at least, not completely.  Yes, she can be mercurial and make bad decisions with men (you can check out her cameo in Reid’s previous novel, Malibu Rising to see what that looked like), but that personality quirk is the engine that drives her to greatness while protecting deep insecurities.  Reid also makes a number of valid commentaries—stuff that should make us all uncomfortable—about female professional athletes and the way we view them and talk about them.  Chief among them is that drive, talent, and confidence—traits that we laud in star male athletes—is read by the public as cold, inaccessible, and “bitchy” when talking about women.  And while arrogant is definitely a word you can use to describe Carrie, is that really the right word when talent backs it up?

The individual dynamics she shares with the men in her life are also quite nuanced.  Javi has, for a really long time, been unable to relate to Carrie simply as a father to a daughter, even though he’s coached her to greatness.  Meanwhile, her relationship with Bowe is initially defined by an inability to see him as worthy competition for glory, for attaining their respective goals, and for Javi’s attention.  Carrie’s need to compete drives the story forward and is the perfect vehicle to do so.  Kudos also goes to Ms. Reid for her immersive description of a tennis match.

Taylor Jenkins Reid has become my favorite author of the 2020’s, and Carrie Soto is Back is just one more point in that column.  If you haven’t done so already, read this book, and if you have, do it again!

Pros: Great character work; poignant commentary on the way the world views elite female athletes.

Cons: Nope, can’t find one.  Great read.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.