So many thoughts here that I could verbally volley about it for an hour, as a nearly lifelong tennis fan, former tennis journalist and media contributor, yada yada. In short, it's wild to think that, yes, records stand so as to fall; consider the plight of Pete Sampras, who retired with 14 major titles earlier this very century only to have his mark beaten once, twice, thrice by guys named Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.

Two of those three are still playing, too, and all three were until days ago. Suffice to say, kind of odd and glorious to read this book over the weeks of Federer and Serena Williams retiring from (or "evolving away from") tennis.

I'll organize this review like so:

Aces:
+ Carrie's delightfully backhanded conversations with rival Nicki Chan, the most compelling exchanges of dialogue throughout to the point that I just wanted them together in every scene, spitting game in locker rooms, back courts, or bars (all those come to pass, btw)
+ The ambitious, even audacious decision to have Carrie embark on a yearlong comeback swing cutting across all four Grand Slam events
+ Author Reid's obvious affinity for Andre Agassi's memoir Open, ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer – forever my favorite athlete autobiography, from my favorite tennis retiree
+ Any and all references in the story to The Inner Game of Tennis, a book I've started that was actually recommended by my piano instructor; it's said to be a surefire classic
+ The brief but effective intros made to casual tennis fans and non-fans about how to score (or cope with the scoring of) tennis, such a nuanced sport
+ Reid's choice to place the Grand Slam title haul that Carrie and Nicki are pursuing at a lower count than that of Serena and Steffi Graf, thus indicating, given the action climaxes in 1995-96, that even one of their own records would go on to be broken not just once, even twice

Unforced errors:
- A lot of the actual tennis-playing sections felt rote; they could've been framed and worded in much more interesting ways
- A sincere lack of introspection – by Carrie or anyone – about such a specific, solitary sport, and one's place in it
- Coupled with that, an over-reliance on Carrie as comeback artist hellbent on retaining a single (or singular) record, to the sad extent that she has nothing else to think or talk about (yes, part of the point made by the book)
- One hardly needed Hawkeye technology to see the denouement's outcome coming into focus from a few pages away
- In general, the writing wasn't particularly compelling; I had heard of the Evelyn Hugo novel as a dynamic hit, but this did not wow me
- Reid's seeming lack of research about Serena's own chasing of a record, allegedly (but not really) held by the controversial Margaret Court; she stated in an interview that she hadn't seen, in her weeks of immersion into tennis content and history, any accounts of Serena self-describing as chasing Court's mark (24 major titles to her own eventual 23) – and yet, candidly, Serena has done as much as anyone to validate Court's so-called record, speaking to it with frequency, and most recently (long after this book was written) in her goodbye essay for Vogue's September 2022 issue

In the end, a decent lot to like about this novel. Some faults, and not a smash by any means, but a steady, healthy entry into the tennis-fiction oeuvre. (JK, there's a tiny list to date.) I read it faster than anything else in the past couple years, perhaps in part because I knew the subject matter overly well and it otherwise came across as penned at a 9th-grade reading level.