Eleven-year-old squash prodigy Gopi finds herself thrown into a professional career when her mother dies and her father takes control of her life. This is equal parts entertaining and heart-wrenching and a fantastic immersion into the little written about world of squash. There is no surprise in its longlisting for the 2023 Booker Prize.

I absolutely loved this book!! I couldn’t put it down.
I just loved all the characters. I highly recommend this book.

11-year-old Gopi and her two older sisters have just lost their mother. Their father, distant, distracted, reserved, decides to help them cope by getting them really into squash. Like, reeeeaaaallllly into squash.

This novel has the silent self-containment of a squash court, so the metaphor works. Unfortunately I ended up caring much more about the rules and play of squash than I did about any of the characters, who failed to become real or understandable to me.

I could not connect to the characters, and the relationships were all unhealthy. The writing was good but the subject matter did not interest me in any way

I was quite disappointed by this read, perhaps coming into it with some expectations I carried over from reading Taylor Jenkins Reid's "Carrie Soto is Back", and anticipating similar excitement. Western Lane is a very slow-paced coming-of-age story of a young girl and athlete, her sport being squash. The focus of the story is more so on family relationships and grief, rather than the sport itself. However, this book, only being approximately 160 pages long, provides little depth or background to these relationships, only the surface of which are skimmed.

Coming-of-age stories are often slow-paced and descriptive, but this short book didn’t allow me to really connect with the main character or truly understand her growth. I wish the book had been a little bit longer, allowing for a better balance of sports action and character development.

⚠️ Potential trigger warnings: grief, loss, family separation (may not be an exhaustive list)

🙏 Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the gifted electronic copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I picked this book up because I couldn't imagine how someone could write a book about squash! Boy was I surprised at deeply felt the story was. The way the family deals with the loss of their Mother and how they keep it together through sport was really beautiful.

I quite enjoyed reading this book. Maroo keep me engaged in the story. The characters became real. I would recommend this book.

This story emphasizes how everyone deals with grief differently. We follow Gopi a young girl after the death of her mother, and how her family copes with this loss.

The only way Gopi’s father seems to be able to connect to her and her sisters is through training and playing squash with them.

An absolutely beautiful book that follows a family of three sisters and their father after their mother passes away. Squash becomes something for them to bond over, an activity to focus on to distract them from their grief. It is a very quiet novel, but I thought the writing was incredible. I love how fleshed out the relationships were - Pa and his daughters, the sisters, Ged and Gopi, Gopi and squash. My favourite parts were the description of squash; the practices, the match play, and the analysis of old matches. I love sports as a microcosm and thought this book did an excellent job of using squash to move the story forward. I thought it was an interesting introspective of grief and how someone fits into their family and how that evolves over time.

After the death of their mother, thirteen-year old Gopi (the narrator), and her two elder sisters Khush and Mona and their father are grieving and a little lost. Their father urges them to focus their energy on something to get through this time, and he gets them all playing squash daily, running drills, practising for hours, and watching videos of specific players to improve their game. Gopi even gets good enough for a family friend to say she should enter a competition. Meanwhile, the family is coming apart: their father doesn’t show up to work consistently and Mona has to take over caring for the family, finding work and trying to manage the house. Khush has sleepless nights, while Gopi practices obsessively.

The writing is subtle, though I felt a little too subtle at times, leaving me to sometimes wonder what was going on in a scene or with a character's emotions. I also had some trouble connecting with the characters, but I think this may be deliberate, as they’re all grieving and muted in their actions and emotions.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Penguin Random House Canada for this ARC in exchange for my review.

There's a certain nuance to the disconnect that I felt while reading this book, but unfortunately, by the end, I was so disconnected that the impact wasn't as meaningful. Western Lane follows Gopi and her family who have recently lost their mother and the struggles that they endure in a single-parent household while trying to achieve greatness as a squash player. It has all the right ingredients for a quietly powerful literary fiction novel but just fell short of being extremely impactful.

"Western Lane" is a book about a family trying to find a new normal in the aftermath of a death. It is a quick, lyrical read about grief that I thorougly enjoyed.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review. enjoyed,

This novel read more like a short story than a book. It was a meandering read with a beautiful depiction of how family life continues on after the death of one of its members. The author obviously has a deep understanding of living with grief. I enjoyed the flow of the book but wanted to learn more about the characters. I felt I had to fill in the blanks myself. While I'm not often looking for a "Hollywood ending" that ties everything up cleanly, I was left wanting more with the conclusion of this book. If you are looking for a quiet, almost lyrical read - check this one out!

Western Lane is a short read by Chetna Maroo it is coming-of-age story about grief, sisterhood. Their common bond is squash, which he forces them to play, and it is how he tries to connect to them. This book fell flat for me. I wish the characters were developed more, and the story had more depth.


Thank you #netgalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I couldn’t get into this one, I tend to like spare, quiet little novels and stories about families but this fell flat for me.

I really wanted to like this but I was quite bored. I wish it was more about the main character and the sport of squash and less about all of the people involved.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book. It is a short novel that centers the experience of grief through the lens of the father and three daughters left behind who don't know how to deal with their new reality. There were some well-written family dynamics, especially with the aunt and uncle, and how their views and desires clash with those of the father and daughters.

I really enjoyed this debut, even though some of it was confusing. The main protagonist was 11 year old Gopi, whose mother has died. Her father doesn’t know what to do with her and her two older sisters, so he trains them obsessively in squash. Gopi is a natural, but only on the court. In her home, she doesn’t know how she fits in. I wasn’t sure where in the UK this was taking place, and there was confusion about different racquet sports - is there a World Open for squash? But the main story about the family not knowing how to cope with the loss of their mother was emotionally engaging.

Western Lane is a quiet novel about a family--three sisters and a father--in the wake of their grief. The issue here is that it is so quiet as to feel completely muted--and that's really the beginning and the end of why I didn't find this novel to be particularly memorable, or even moving. Theoretically, the elements of its story should work for me: I love stories about families, especially ones that focus on the dynamics between a small group of characters. But the way this novel is written made it so difficult for me to connect with its story. The general impression I get from Western Lane is that it was aiming for subtlety and nuance but instead overcorrected and tamped down its entire narrative: that is, rather than subtle, the writing just felt flat, one-note. I wanted more from this story, because there were glimmers here and there of genuinely interesting or compelling moments. But it was like the narrative kept refusing to give me even the faintest bit more: more feeling, more introspection, just...more. I understand that this tamping-down is a function of the characters' grief--specifically the narrator, Gopi's, grief--but I just don't think the way it was done here served the story or its characters well.

There are quiet novels and then there are boring novels, and I hate to say it, but I feel like Western Lane was more of the latter than the former for me. I've only just finished it, and I've pretty much forgotten everything about it.

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for providing me with an eARC of this via NetGalley!