What is Carrie Soto Is Back about?

Carrie Soto is a retired tennis legend with twenty Grand Slam titles, the most in history — until a young player named Nicki Chan wins her twenty-first and breaks Carrie's record. At thirty-seven, Carrie comes out of retirement to take it back. The premise sounds like a sports movie, and Reid leans into that: this is a novel about competition as a form of self-knowledge, about what drives a person to sacrifice everything for excellence, and about whether the thing you gave your whole life to was worth it.

Carrie is not likable in the conventional sense. She is cold, exacting, relentlessly self-critical, and largely friendless. Reid has said she wanted to write a female protagonist who operates the way male antiheroes do — driven to the point of damage, not apologizing for it. The novel takes that seriously. Carrie's relationship with her father Javier, who has coached her since childhood and whose own failed tennis career runs beneath hers like a shadow, is the emotional core of the book. Their dynamic is loving and warped in equal measure.

The tennis is rendered with credibility — Reid clearly did the research — but the matches serve the character rather than the other way around. What makes the sport work narratively is that tennis is fundamentally solitary: you win and lose alone, which externalizes Carrie's interior life in a way team sports wouldn't. The timeline moves between Carrie's early career and the comeback year of 1994, and the contrast between the two Carries is where the novel finds its deepest material.

This is Reid's most focused novel and in some ways her least accessible one. Carrie is not designed to be rooted for unambiguously — she's designed to be understood. Readers who want a character who is also genuinely difficult, who makes choices that are self-defeating and still can't stop making them, will find this the most interesting book in Reid's catalog. Readers who want warmth and clear moral sympathy will find Evelyn Hugo easier company.