The Singles Game
by lauren weisberger
Book on CD
This is as much a modern story encompassing everything from one nighters, social commentary, and some version of modern love. It does use tennis as the backdrop and I suppose it is the main storyline. I found myself amused at the Valley girl narration, not that there’s anything wrong with that approach, but it gave me a mental image of a relative airhead tennis player. The mistakes made by Charlie, her nickname for Charlotte, leading up to her failures annoyed me mainly because with the type of time investment described in her training she found ways to sabotage her wins with dalliances. The imagery focused mainly on well proportioned male players, hunks with attitudes, and beautiful and fit female players. The male coach Todd that she hired was a real special case of bad attitude seemed overdone. I suppose there are players that would need that or be willing to submit to his methods in order to win, but the feeling was that it was a deal with the devil that inevitably would fail as it did at least in performance terms since she didn’t win her major. Again it was distractions that cost her the win.
I picked this book up because it was about tennis and stayed with it because it had enough reality to it that it is worth the time invested. Plus, I’ve found a new author I might investigate for other books to read.
The title is a play on words since the singles aspect of it has as much to do with the main female character’s personal life as it does with tennis, the backdrop.
There is a dearth of tennis fiction so for anyone looking for tennis related reading I can say it was worth listening to for 10 CDs worth of time.
Recommend ***and 1/2 stars
