Review: After Wimbledon by Jennifer Gilby Roberts (5/5)

Wednesday 2 July 2014
After 12 years on the pro. tennis tour and four years with her sort-of boyfriend, Lucy Bennett has had enough. She wants real life... and real love.

Her life, her decision. Right? Well, no one else seems to think so. With opinions on all sides, Lucy's head is spinning. And she's stumbling right into the arms of long-term crush and fellow player Sam. Shame her boyfriend - his arch-rival - would sooner smash a racquet over their heads than agree to a simple change of partners.

As the Wimbledon Championships play out, Lucy fights for her life on and off the courts. The question is: what will she be left with after Wimbledon?




Jennifer was one of the first people to follow and interact with me on Twitter when I started my blog and is an incredibly lovely and generous person. She is also a big supporter of bloggers on Twitter. I really wanted to read her books but had a TBR mountain, I still do but I won her books through a giveaway and I love Wimbledon so managed to read this book in between games or 'after Wimbledon' had finished for the day. I went into it hoping it would be as good as I wanted it to be and luckily, it was!

I was really looking forward to the book given its subject matter and also because of some of the great reviews I read beforehand. After finishing this book I can safely say it was fantastic and I loved it. As with my other favourite genre, crime fiction, chick lit is very overcrowded, it takes a talented author to stand out. Jennifer's writing style is definitely her own, she has a very distinctive style of writing and it is very funny. We all love a bit of humour in chick lit and Jennifer does it brilliantly. Subtle at times and obvious in others it was great. Alongside the humour though we look for a good story and this book definitely has that. I thought some sentences were quite short though and perhaps commas could have been used instead.

You don't need to be a tennis fan to enjoy the book, it's just the setting of the book after all. However it does play a big role in the book. Each chapter bar one or two is set on each day at Wimbledon, as a fan of short chapters I struggled to put the book down as I can't put a book down mid-chapter and some of the ones here were quite long. I loved our main character Lucy. Written in the first person which I love in chick lit, she came across as a very likeable character. Not perfect by any means but I did feel for her throughout the book, especially the scenes with her horrible mother and even worse boyfriend, tennis obsessed fellow player Joe. I loved Lucy's personality, she could be quite sarcastic and cynical at times and I loved that. Joe is particularly nasty throughout the book, he's the sort of person that phones Lucy up asking if he can come round for sex and then not bothering when she refuses. And her mother is living her life through Lucy after she gave up her career to have a baby. Hardly Lucy's fault her mum got pregnant and had a baby. I absolutely despise parents like this.

As with most chick lit it's always fairly obvious where the story is going to go, in this case Lucy is having doubts over Joe and is developing feelings for his rival Sam. However it's the journey to the end that is most enjoyable and Lucy faces quite a few obstacles along the way. Full of hilarity but touching moments too this was a hugely enjoyable read for me and perfect to read alongside one of the highlights of the year, Wimbledon itself. As someone who gets quite involved watching the game (I write this review with no voice after Murray/Dimitrov) I found myself supporting the players in this book and wanting them to win and screaming at the book when things didn't go my way! Jennifer definitely throws a few surprises in here and some things go the way I wasn't expecting. With a very satisfying ending I can't reccommend this book more. Just brilliant. It's also a relatively short read too, only 260 or so pages so I flew through it.

But from Amazon

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