I don't have an athletic bone in my body, and I hate competitive sports. So I was wary about reading a novel starring a tennis pro. But Lauren Weisberger's The Singles Game won me over from the first serve. That's because The Devil Wears Prada phenom is unparalleled in telling tales of fame and fortune. She drills down through the glamor and games to give us very human heroines torn between glory and the truth of their hearts. And The Singles Game's Charlotte Silver slams some of the toughest truths yet.
Charlie's story starts when a career-threatening injury at Wimbledon forces her to make a choice: retire early or double down to become the champion she's always known she could be. So she ditches her compassionate coach for a viper and embarks on a rebrand that transforms her from goody-two-shoes to "warrior princess." She's immediately thrust into the celebrity sphere of parties, hookups, and a near-sadistic training regimen. It's a cocktail of glitz and grit (even if she's only allowed Pellegrino), all part of the persona that her new coach plots to portray. But winning the warrior way means more than swapping her tennis whites for bedazzled black. It means playing dirty, which is the opposite of what Charlie's old coach and her tennis pro dad taught her.
I didn't always like Charlie or the choices she made, but I think that's what Weisberger wants. We're supposed to question her dubious path and wonder what we'd do in her Nikes. Yet her never-say-die spirit, girl-next-door origins, and inner moral compass, however thwarted, make her sympathetic even when she's wrong. She's the everywoman we want to root for because at her root, she's all of us.
Game, set, match, Weisberger.
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