It has been a while since I’ve written a long book review but while reading this book I felt like I needed to vent so here it is. This book was not my favourite. And maybe I should have stopped reading it but honestly by the time I was fed up with it I was already too far gone so I had to finish it.
One of the red flags for me is that this book centres around a family of tennis players and it turns out I don’t reading about tennis lol. I listened to the audiobook of Carrie Soto Is Back last year and it’s all about tennis, and while I thought that was fine, reading a second book about tennis cemented that it’s not for me. I’m not a sports girlie and I guess that also extends to reading about it.
Aside from the tennis, it took me a while to get into this book. I thought the first few chapters were interesting, hearing about a woman going missing through the people who were eavesdropping on the woman’s family but after that, the book started to drag.
To be fair, the book does cover a lot of storylines but I don’t think all of them were necessary. I mean the main mystery is this woman who appears on the doorstep of Joy and Stan Delaney, who used to run a tennis coaching school. And at the beginning of the book we find out that Joy has gone missing, so naturally it has to do with this random stranger who showed up at her house.
But alongside this mystery, we also get side stories about all four of Joy’s children and the type of people they are and their relationships or lack thereof. And honestly? I didn’t need that. I just felt like it was exhausting keeping up with all their stories while also wondering what the hell happened to Joy. I get that the book is meant to be about this family and their dynamics, but if that’s what you want, then just have it as that. Why do we need this overarching theme of a missing person as well?
The story switches between the present and the past and in the past is where we learn about this mysterious house guest, Savannah. From the start, it looks like Savannah has something to do with Joy’s disappearance. But as time goes on, the story with Savannah grows very confusing. She stays with Joy and Stan and cooks for them and seems to be imitating the perfect daughter which irritates Joy’s children to no end. And they are all working to find out why she’s really there because it doesn’t make sense for this random girl to show up on their doorstep and esstentially move in.
And when we do learn the truth about who Savannah is and why she was there, it was so anticlimactic. Like finding out the family knew her before and apparently treated her like garbage, it was giving me GCSE English vibes when I was studying An Inspector Calls. But in a really long-winded (400 pages) way. It just wasn’t for me. Plus her ways of getting revenge on the family were random and still did not explain why Savannah was treating Joy so well when she of all of them is the reason her life was terrible. I guess it was to show that Savannah was a complex character but honestly it just read as if the author couldn’t decide if Savannah was a villain or not and I just needed commitment for her to be completely evil or not.
Along with that, an underlying theory for what happened to Joy is that her husband killed her. And towards the end, I was believing that too, or the family actually killed Savannah, and Joy disappeared due to her guilt. Neither of these things turns out to be true, though. And by the time we find this out, you’re already 80% of the way through the book and you know the ending is probably not going to be satisfying, but you have to power through because you’ve made it this far through the novel.
The actual ending is so disappointing as we find out that Joy is alive and well and she just went on a wellness treat with Savannah. Even after all that Savannah did to her family (admittedly, she didn’t do very much) but it’s still not a great ending. Plus, there was a random COVID epilogue which was so unnecessary – I didn’t know when this novel was published, but now I do because COVID dates everything.
It was just so flat. Why build up all this drama and mystery, all for it to mean nothing? I just did not enjoy it at all. I’m also disappointed in myself for continuing to read this even though I did not enjoy it. If it had been 250 pages I wouldn’t feel so bad, but it was so long. Also, they did do a TV show adaptation but after reading this I don’t even wanna watch it. I don’t need to be disappointed all over again.
Sad that I’m ending the year on a bad read, but that just means next year I have the opportunity to start on something good. So I’m going to take a couple of days and decide what my next read will be. If you read this book, let me know what you thought or if you didn’t finish it, when did you give up? I think I should have given up around halfway through, but then that was when it seemed like it might get interesting. Oh well. Here’s to a new year with new reads. I’m glad to put this one behind me.
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