I HAVE BEEN taking a deep dive into Victoria Chang because of an interest in her new book (With My Back to the World) and thought I would give this, her novel for middle school readers, a look even though its title seemed a flashing warning sign.
Turns out (a) the title is, in the first instance, a tennis reference and (b) the novel is in free verse and a brisk, engaging read. I would recommend it, in fact. (Caution: spoilers ahead.)
The narrator/speaker is Frances Chin, who is in circumstances very like Chang's own as a girl (as she notes in an afterword): growing up with Chinese immigrant parents in a mostly-white professional class suburb of Detroit. Frances is 11, has no reliable friends at school, feels the pressure of her parents' high expectations, and has only strained relations with her slightly older sister, Clara.
Over the course of the novel, Frances does make a good friend, Annie, and finds something she is really good at: tennis. She also figures out, Nancy Drew fashion, what is bothering Clara--trichotillomania, compulsive plucking out of one's hair. She finds a way to tip off Clara that she knows what is going on without alerting their parents, a keeping-mum for which Clara is deeply grateful.
Both Frances's new friendship with Annie and the new footing of her relationship with her sister provide examples of relationships in which neither party has a power advantage--in other words, love-love, the score in tennis prior to anyone's scoring a point and gaining an advantage. The ending of the novel is not all roses, but Frances has made important progress.
The plot of the novel has a kind of classic YA shape, with no particular innovations, but the verse of the novel conveys Frances's loneliness, her anxiety, and her eventual coming into hope with great economy and verisimilitude.
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