I finished this year having finished the most in several years, 92 total including audiobooks. I feel like I’m getting pickier in my ratings, where 5 stars is a lot harder to come by. In random order here are my top reads of 2024. Please share your favorites too. Happy New Year!
I also had some favorites on audio!
Combining stories of her own childhood and adolescence while reporting on a unique case of someone she trusted during that time, Piper Weiss has written a story of growing up in the ‘90s mixed with a scandal that broke with her tennis coach.
The author is the same age as me, so I appreciated all the references to the clothes and the styles during the time she was in middle school because it was the same for me. It made her more relatable, as we experienced school and fads together.
It seemed like a lot of this book was written as therapy, as she was coming to grips with what happened and why her coach behaved the way he did. She touched based with a lot of people she knew back then to try to dig for answers and as much information as she could.
I was hoping for more of the true crime aspect of the story. I realize there wasn’t a lot of information out there about it or people who could speak to it, but it read more like a straight-up memoir because of it. I felt there was a lack of information on the subject and we got the ending rather than the beginning and middle.
Those who enjoy reads about girls coming of age in such stories as Marlena by Julie Buntin and Girls on Fire by Robin Wasserman will find similarities to this book.
The uniqueness of the style of writing and the chapter titles cemented her ability as a storyteller. It wouldn’t have been the same book otherwise.
Be sure to follow the tour for more reviews!
Thanks to the publisher and TLC Tours for a copy in exchange for an honest review.
Piper Weiss has served as editor in chief at Levo, editorial director for HelloGiggles, and features editor for the New York Daily News and Yahoo. She is the author of the book My Mom, Style Icon and has written for various publications, including Hazlitt, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Elle.com, and Refinery29. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Find out more about Piper at her website, and connect with her on Instagram.
Go. Be there. For the past six decades Richard Evans has followed that dictum – being where the action was, not just as a tennis writer and broadcaster – 196 Grand Slams and counting – but through his years as a foreign correspondent in America, France and Vietnam as well as a spell as a roving global reporter for the US television programme Entertainment Tonight.
Evans, whose English family fled France in June 1940, also became a National Service Captain in the British army, without having to dodge a bullet which was not the case in Cambodia nor in Miami where he was struck by a cop during an anti-Nixon demonstration.
Evans was in Memphis hours after Martin Luther King was shot; campaigned through Indiana and California with Bobby Kennedy – “a unique politician” – before he, too, was assassinated and witnessed the pre-Olympic demonstrations in 1968 against the Mexican Government which ended in massacre.
He accompanied the Wimbledon champion and activist Arthur Ashe on two trips to Africa, witnessing the dark days of apartheid and was back in South Africa in 1990 covering Mike Gatting’s rebel cricket tour during the historic weeks that saw Nelson Mandela released and apartheid abolished.
Evans paints an insider’s portrait of Margaret Thatcher and No 10 Downing Street during the time he was with the Prime Minister’s daughter, Carol; a romance with the actress Gayle Hunnicutt and two marriages; friendships with Richard Harris, Michael Crawford and more Wimbledon champions than you could fit into the players’ box. He was also the last person to interview Richard Burton.
A life lived to the full, covering the globe with a Roving Eye – being there.
About the author: Richard Evans has been a journalist since the 1960s where he began his career writing for the Evening Standard. He has covered tennis for outlets including the Sunday Times, Fox Sports USA and Tennis Magazine, reporting on more than 196 Grand Slams over the course of his career. Evans was the play-by-play commentator for BBC Radio at Wimbledon for twenty years and was a commentator for the Tennis Channel at the French Open and AO Radio at the Australian Open. He is the author of 18 books, including biographies of tennis legends, the official history of the Davis Cup, and most recently co-authoring Pain, Set & Match. Follow him on Twitter.