Tennis Lessons

Product Information

A beautifully written and psychologically incisive bildungsroman...the arrival of a young writer to watch Observer You wonder if she likes her life, or if she, like you, is dependent on the idea that things will improve Overall, it was a great exploration of character as there wasn’t much in terms of plot. But I loved the writing style and how their pasts were explored, especially Lily’s through mundane memories and conversations with her mum. These moments were witty and full of emotion and that’s what won me over. Since her mother's death, Lily has withdrawn from the world, trapped between grief and anger. She has to break out of this damaging cycle - but how?

This is the voice that rings in your ears. Because you never say the right thing. You’re a disappointment to everyone. You’re a far cry from beautiful - and your thoughts are ugly too. One wonders why we can’t just have the information, particularly as the book is narrated in short titled sections that give the month and age of the character. While initially helpful, these seem to grow more random over the course of the novel, drawing attention to the artifice of the story and away from the world of its narrator. Brilliantly vivid Tennis Lessons is a singular creation - a vivid, funny, emotionally intelligent dissection of an ordinary life. Nicole Flattery This was a book I struggled to write a perfect review about so I do apologise for the ramble that I have put together. It’s very rare that a book leaves me like this but nonetheless it was a very well written novel. Lily and Siobhan live in an apartment building in Belfast and both are grappling with their own loneliness, love and loss despite living strikingly different lives. Lily has shut herself out from the world following the death of her mother and Siobhan is consumed with her affair with a married man and his sporadic visits and messages.

The story has all the makings of a great novel but it didn’t come together. The characters were too similar in many ways - Lily’s mother sounded a lot like Siobhán bizarrely. The episodes did not knit together well. None of the characters were likeable. Siobhán’s relationship with Andrew was interesting in a car-crash sense (hard to look away) but it wasn’t enough to save the book. The epilogue was incongruous and just left me shrugging, I didn’t care. Absolutely brilliant . . . touchingly captures the awkward, aching longing of a misfit . . . darkly funny Express The point, it seems, is not to create a linear story with a believable plot (though there is a certain amount of this), but rather to create a beautiful, symmetrical formation. Images, metaphors, ideas and characters speak to each other across time and space. There are recurring lines and motifs (the ee cummings line “Not even the rain has such small hands” is one example), and although Lily and Siobhán are separate people, at times they seem to share an overlapping consciousness. Lily wondering “if living will ever ... reveal some new facet that isn’t so unbearable”, is not dissimilar to Siobhán feeling “so inescapably joyless that living seems an unnecessary expenditure of energy”.

For me the strongest parts were when she was among her own peers, whether that was with her best friend or the people she outwardly were her friends but were her tormentors. Many teenage girls know about that balance, and whether the reader knows about this first hand or through observation these relationships felt painfully real. Moreover, I challenge anyone not to relate to how it feels to have a joke not land or say the wrong thing at the worst time, as this character so often experiences.Our unnamed narrator takes us through her life, from the age of three to twenty nine. In short vignettes, we glimpse her desperate insecurities, her inability to fit in, her awkwardness among her peers and with her parents, and her slowly finding what it means to be happy in your own skin.