Despite this being my second tennis romance of the year and my father who was a very big fan of watching almost every slam, I still have no idea how tennis actually works. And in this novel there was a lot of tennis, like, A LOT.

But this novel also has a very cute lovestory that lets the two characters breathe. The first tennis romance I've read this year, The Open Era, had a plot that revolved around just the almost two weeks of the US open and that was so fast. Here, we have a whole year and I liked to see how a relationship, that started out as a rivalry, can bloom. Some parts I found to be a bit surface level in both of the characters characterization (e.g. I think Gabe isn't a fully fleshed out character and I don't really know him, the side characters were lacking, the plot around Leo and his dad could also go deeper) and the ending with the conflict seemed to me a bit rushed, only to be very neatly tied up with bow in the end. Also why do we need to recite Golden Girls word for word while they are watching an episode at least twice in this book? That was a bit too lazy for me. I'd rather read more match descriptions of a sport I don't care for than this, even if I have no clue what's going on.

But in the end this was very cute and written by someone who clearly cares abput tennis in a nerdy way and about being gay. Yay!