Beautiful Game by Kate ChristieMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is my sixth book by this author, and fourth soccer book (author really likes soccer).
I rather liked watching the slice of life, slow growth story that unfolded. First Camille ‘Cam’ Wallace needed to move past ‘oh my, that’s Jess! Star tennis player!’ to becoming friends with Jess, then to something more than friends. Very slow going. Years. But it was neat, despite the slowness. Fun.
This is one of those books that the story really seems quite solid, and the writing isn’t that bad either. One massive problem I had, though, that kept me from moving beyond a four star rating – the writing style is one I’ve seen before but it is also one that creates, almost automatically, a ‘distancing’ between the reader and the action occurring in the book. As in – the book was written as if the narrator is some 94 year-old woman remembering her time at college, though without including the part where some 94 year old was introduced and without including any overarching narrator voice. But it was written in an ‘I remember when my junior year started. How the grass smelled. How Holly helped me unpack – she somewhat forced me to unpack, in fact, because I had literally had boxes at the end of the last year that I had taken down from Oregon that, by the end of the year, still hadn’t been unpacked.’ That is not lifted from the book, though the situation was. No, it’s more the way the book was written that I’m trying to convey here. The story told through a heavy lens of nostalgia.
That – the distancing, plus the relatively uninformative story telling element used when conveying sports action, left me wanting, and kept me from rating this anything higher than 4 stars. There were moments that shown through, though. Touching scenes, moments, actions – one I recall specifically had me staring at the cover . . . and realizing that an opportunity had been lost (view spoiler)/
Wow, my ability to write reviews has suffered greatly. I’d say ‘two main characters’, but this is just from the point of view of Cam, and for a while there, the two main characters would have been Cam and her best friend . . . um, and I want to say ‘Holly’ but might get the name wrong. Holly, though, wasn’t the love interest, that’d be Jess the tennis star. With Cam (and Holly, and Laura, and Mel, and others) being soccer stars. The book follows Cam as she lives soccer, drinks a lot, tries to live down a particular reputation, and builds a relationship with Jess (a friendship is a type of relationship), all while attending college in a different state from which she was born (college - California; born - Oregon).
Rating: 4.00
May 9 2017
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