Book Synopsis:
The darkly funny, fiercely honest debut novel about a spirited young misfit and her rocky road to womanhood, stopping at each year along the way.
You’re strange and wrong. You’ve known it from the beginning.
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.
You seem bound to fail, bound to break.
But you know what it is to laugh with your best friend, to feel the first tentative tingles of attraction, to take exquisite pleasure in the affront of your unruly body.
You just need to find your place.
From dead pets and crashed cars to family traumas and misguided love affairs, Susannah Dickey’s revitalizing debut novel plunges us into the private world of one young woman as she navigates her rocky way to adulthood.
Tennis Lessons is available in ebook and hardback now. You can purchase your copy using the link below.
My Review:
Tennis Lessons is a beautifully written, poignant coming of age story which will stay with me for a long time.
The thing that most makes this book is the fantastic narrator who you just can’t help falling in love with. She’s such a memorable character who after a promising start is having a bit of a hard time of things as she’s being bullied at school and has a tricky home life. She quite a tough girl though and is surprisingly forgiving which makes her incredibly endearing.
The style of the book is a little unusual as it’s told in the second person. It took me a little while to get used to but once I did it made perfect sense to me as I felt it perfectly represented the narrator’s unusual, quirky personality which I thought was very clever.
Overall I really enjoyed this book and following the narrator on her journey. It’s a bit of a roller coaster ride at times with some of the teenage scenes being frighteningly realistic and I often wished I could reach into the book and give the narrator a hug. The ending was perhaps not the happy ever after ending I was hoping for but it was a realistic one and it was great to see how much she had grown.
Huge thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me onto the blog tour and to Transworld for my copy of this book via Netgalley.
About The Author:
Susannah Dickey grew up in Derry and now lives in Belfast. She is the author of two poetry pamphlets, I had some very slight concerns (2017) and genuine human values (2018). Her poetry has been published in Ambit, The White Review, Poetry Ireland Review and Magma, amongst others. In 2018 she was shortlisted for The White Review short story prize, and in 2017 she was the winner of the inaugural Verve Poetry Festival competition. Her debut novel, Tennis Lessons, will be published in June 2020.
Over The Rainbow Blog 
Fab review xx
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Thanks so much for the blog tour support Jo x
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