An interesting coming-of-age novel, following the adventures and exploits of an unnamed character as she fumbles her way from childhood to her twenties, making many mistakes along the way. An unflinching portrait of a flawed human being, the book covers mainly of life's huge issues, including bullying, bodies, sex and death. Very raw, very honest - a very interesting read, and I look forward to seeing what the author produces next.

This book is......................Beautifully messy and complicated, confusing and honest and full of life.

Tennis Lessons tells the story of a young girl growing up and trying to navigate her way through a life that is confusing and often, frightening. Written as a series of memories, it is shockingly honest, and terribly sad in places. She is dealing with her mother's mental illness, her father's affair, her own brutal sexual assault, and feeling like she is an aberration.

The only light relief comes in the form of her friendship with Rachael, with whom she can be weird and feel accepted for it.

She recounts early sexual experiences that leave her feeling cold and unaroused. She feels that there must be something wrong with her, and that her parents are ashamed and disappointed of the person she is.

I loved the brutal honesty of her thoughts, those intrusive thoughts that we all have at times, but are not often written about. Whilst this was at times dark, there was however a note of optimism as this young woman begins to find her place in the world and accept that perhaps oblivion is not what she seeks after all.

Tennis Lessons is a dark coming of age story narrated by the unnamed female protagonist, telling her life from an infant to young adulthood. I found it a tense, difficult and shallow read, unlikable characters especially the protagonist. Three stars.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK for giving me a chance!

Now, onto the book. For a book that is just over two hundred and fifty pages, I sure took my time finishing it. It’s just…second person is not something I will ever be comfortable with, I think. The concept is something I thoroughly got interested in and the author really made a great try at it.

The story is about a young girl growing up and fumbling through the many obstacles and weirdness that is just being a teenager. I enjoyed the story style, it’s staggered and more like snippets shared from a life than the actual life. Considering the main character, I think it really works well. The feeling of being lost while just stepping into the adulthood is something a lot of people can relate to and it’s written well.

Sometimes the writing got a bit too…fancy which, I don’t think, matched the overall tone of the book but that’s not to say the book doesn’t flow well. It was just a bit jarring sometimes. I think that I am not ever gonna be a fan of second person POV and that’s one of the main problems I had with this book. That’s on me and not the book, perhaps. I can’t stay completely objective about the book if I am to say what pleased me and what didn’t.

I think a lot of people will certainly be able to relate to quite a number of things that the main character goes through. The friendships and how the young woman navigates through all that is something I really felt in my heart. Gosh, I think, we are a few generations who are still wondering why our life is so messed as it is now and how we are going to actually come out of it or a worse question, will we come out of this mess.

Overall, I really enjoyed the way the story unfolded, the feeling of not being good enough or being like ‘normal’ is something we are all familiar with in our way. So this will be an interesting read for that reason alone.

From the blurb, I thought that Susannah Dickey’s debut would be a straightforward, entertaining coming-of-age novel but Tennis Lessons turned out to be rather darker than that, unfolding the story of a young woman, out of step and struggling to find a niche for herself.

Our unnamed narrator is a bright, imaginative child who knows her parents’ marriage is difficult. Secondary school is happily anticipated but making friends is hard until Racheal saves her, inviting her to join Bethan and the sharp-tongued Charlie. Our narrator struggles through adolescence as her parents continue their march towards splitting up. Then, on Racheal’s eighteenth birthday, things take a very dark turn. The next ten years will see our narrator taking steps forward and back until she finally finds some peace for herself.

Dickey tells her story in a series of episodic vignettes beginning when our narrator is just three. Her early years are bright snapshots of an eccentric, insatiably curious little girl, lengthening into longer episodes as she grows up, becoming more aware of the disconnect between herself and her peers. Adolescence is excruciatingly well portrayed, particularly Charlie’s cruelty for which she has her own reasons. Dickey credits her readers with the intelligence to infer, leaving much unsaid, and her book is all the better for it. Not always a comfortable read, then, but a witty, compassionate one which champions the value of friendship.

The themes of family, failure, and trauma shaping the main character's life paint a subtle picture of growing up discontent. The story is told chronologically with short extracts from each year of the main character's life. It's an easy one to read quickly, but it doesn't hold much depth. I felt that it tried to narrate elements of gross realism and of a weird internal life, similar to Ottessa Moshfegh, but something fell short of making it interesting. I normally enjoy books where not much happens, but in this one it felt like there was no real point - you never really got to know the main character.

This reads a lot like Saltwater by Jessica Andrews, which debuted in May 2019. Both play around with structure, the text being broken up in to short snippets of weighted prose. There’s lots of imagery and metaphors that play dangerously close to being purple prose. They both have young female narrators who in early adulthood are a bit lost, and pore over the minutiae of their average childhoods, everyday life, and the complicated relationships and histories of their parents.

I found Tennis Lessons better than Saltwater in that it actually delivers a narrative through an artsy lens and it doesn't rely too heavily on poetic imagery, whereas Saltwater is so caught up in trying to be uber-poetic and linguistically clever, that it gets lost within itself.

I think what will attract and engage a lot of readers with Tennis Lessons is that it’s so ordinary, readers will be able to identify with the narrator. Irish/British girls who came of age between roughly 2006-2012 (give or take a year or two) will definitely have had similar experiences and I think this will be what endears the narrator and the story to them, especially given this is written in a rare second-person narrative: you can self-insert. It also speaks to a collective generational mood: there’s something wrong with us, life shouldn’t be this hard, so why is it?

Ultimately however, it wasn't what I expected and I don't think I'll read it again, (I struggled to keep reading the first time if I'm honest), but I can see Tennis Lessons appealing to readers who love Sally Rooney and detailed fiction on emotions.

I didn't finish this one at 45%. I found the main character unbearable and felt like I couldn't gel with the plot whatsoever.

I was primarily drawn to Tennis Lessons based on the endorsement by Louise O’Neill, author of the stunning decidedly dark narratives Only Ever Yours and Asking For It. Both have complex, flawed yet sympathetic female protagonists at their centres. Raw? Fierce? Shockingly honest? Tennis Lessons was entirely lacking for me in this regard. I was intrigued by the first third, which moves through snatches of time from the female narrator’s third birthday up to her late teens and into her early twenties. Sadly the remaining novel stays with the excruciatingly unpleasant narrator during her self-destructive years but without any sense of her learning anything along the way. It’s just one horrible experience after another with no indication that the narrator has any motivation at all to make things better for herself. I’m sorry to say that I found this to be completely vacuous.

An interesting, modern coming of age novel written in the first person present through the course of a girl’s life from infancy to adulthood. It charts the course of a breakdown in her late teens, how she got to that point and how she recovered.

The writing is very personally descriptive and full of intimate detail. This makes some of the events disturbing to read, especially the rape scene.

A choice for someone who wants to hear a new voice in fiction.

Writing a whole coming-out-of-age novel in the second person is a bold choice but Susannah Dickey makes it work. Following the main character from her third birthday until her late twenties, you go through all the heartaches, pains, disappointments, weird thoughts... with her and the writing style puts you right inside her head. A lot of the book was quite bleak (some sexual encounters will make you deeply uncomfortable, if not outraged), but a lot of it was very tender - her friendship with Rachael, her mother, her father - I found it very moving.

Tennis Lessons is a no holds barred journey through childhood and adolescence into adulthood. It’s a honest depiction of growing up, initially through a child’s eyes, into the horrors of navigating the teenage years and beyond. The main character is quirky and socially awkward, but manages to form a long lasting friendship with Rachael at High School. After a traumatic experience at the age of seventeen, her life goes off the rails until she manages to right herself and continue onwards.
There are many highs and lows within this book, and every reader will find something they can relate to within the pages. Not all parts of the story are easy to read, but it’s authenticity is derived from this approach.

The first pages were confusing and uncomfortable and I wasn't quite sure if this book was for me. It's unique writing style, the way it felt like it was skimming over necessary details, and the jumping between years and months, like days. But once you get through the adjustment period, you begin to understand the sheer depth of adolescent and adult issues and thoughts that are portrayed so well. I had thought this book was about nothing, but it's really about everything. The emotion and low self esteem that lies behind the words is really impressive.

I really struggled to enjoy this book at all, to me it reads like a collection of unsavoury and unpleasant encounters of a young girl's that goes nowhere over the course of about 14 years of a pretty dismal life.

The nameless main character moves through a series of grim situations, narrated oddly in the second-person, major issues such as worries about an HIV-infected uncle and rape sitting alongside prolonged descriptions of ingrowing toenails and skin problems.

A coming of age novel that describes difficult situations that failed to resonate with me, and missing any grace or sense of redemption.

Tennis Lessons is sparse yet compelling; unafraid of grossness or violence. The second-person voice is interesting, and forces a bit of empathy (I automatically tried to place myself in the main character's shoes). Not an easy read (it's often quite heavy), but I liked watching the main character grow into herself a little bit: living is hard, and Susannah Dickey knows it.

- Nirica from Team Champaca

Tennis Lessons by Susannah Dickey narrates the life of a seemingly misfit who feels that everything she does and says is wrong. As a debut novel, the author's grasp of developmental psychology makes this book worth reading. The empathetic approach to the struggles of trying to be normal makes this book such a compelling read. As we are introduced to the different characters in the book, the author shows human fallibility as acceptable, imperfection is relatable. This book is an interesting read and I recommend it.

found this coming of age novel interesting as the major character fumbles her way through life in a haze of alcohol and discovery and in some parts funny as we all search for a way in life no matter what mistakes are made.

A wild read a coming of age following this woman from childhood through her twenties.Raw real graphic drew me right in could not put down. A book that stays with you even after you finish the last page,#netgalley#randomhouseuk

When I think of certain passages of Tennis Lessons, my cheeks burn and my toes curl with embarrassment, because Susannah Dickey's account of the good, the bad and the ugly of growing up and feeling out of place excruciatingly real.

The book follows the main character from the time she is three years old up until her late twenties, and never flinches away from things we prefer not to talk about, from conversations we were never supposed to hear to dark thoughts we can't unthink, from ingrown toenails to blood clots, from times we were the victim to times when we were the bully.

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.

However, her absurd and witty conversations with her friend are funny and heartwarming, as for all the bad luck she has with friends she struck lucky at least once. Similarly, though her parents relationship is fraught, it is clear that they love her so dearly. We watch the character stumble so many times and I genuinely felt for her while reading about unsatisfying to horrific sexual encounters and being completely certain something is wrong with her, and it made me quite emotional then towards the end of the book as she slowly but surely starts to find her place in the world, and starts to find out what it is like to be happy in her own skin.

Not always an easy read, but something you will fly through, cringing and laughing all the way. Dickey is certainly a talent to watch.