While I’m not usually much of a sports romance person, recent pop culture events have gotten me a little more intrigued by the genre. In the very specific mood to read romance complicated by the high stakes and rivalries of professional athletics, I downloaded an eARC of Meg Jones’s upcoming tennis romance novel Set Point on a whim and found that it hit the spot.
Set Point follows Inés Costa, a Spanish former child prodigy whose tennis career has recently been slowed by stress injuries. Chloe Murphy, a hot-headed new favorite in the sport, is eating up the attention, success, and sponsorships that once belonged to Inés. But when the two women are paired together for a game of doubles at a charity event, they find they work surprisingly well together. Chloe challenges Inés, while Inés is able to soothe Chloe’s temper and channel her strong emotions into a more productive performance. The two of them agree on an alliance: Chloe will help fund Inés’s journey to the US open, while Inés will become Chloe’s hitting partner and help her keep her anger under control. As the two of them find their rivalry transforming into a partnership on the court, sparks also begin to fly between them off-court.
Set Point is the third installment in Jones’s Game, Set, and Match series, but can easily be read as a starting point, which is what I did. While I admit to being the kind of person who watched Challengers and came away having absorbed no actual knowledge about the sport of tennis, that’s not really a barrier to understanding or enjoying Set Point. Jones does a great job of grounding the athletic scenes in the emotional journeys of Inés and Chloe rather than assuming the reader understands technicalities of the sport. While I’m sure there’d be an extra layer of enjoyment to be found in knowing more about tennis, Set Point is also easily accessible to anyone who just wants to read about a rivalry turning into a hot romance.
And it’s an excellent rivalry! With romances that have an enemies-to-lovers component, it can be difficult for a story to balance a genuine reason for characters to be at odds with their developing attraction. Set Point, I think, does this quite well. Inés has personal and professional reasons to dislike Chloe, who is quickly stealing Inés’s place as a young tennis favorite… and also kissed Inés at a party several months ago only to ghost her afterwards. Chloe, on the other hand, is a powder keg of a woman straining under her parents expectations and her own emotional volatility who has been raised to see other female athletes as competition. The rivalry between the two of them feels like it has real heft behind it, but the banter and attraction that grows between Chloe and Inés as they become closer was also enjoyable. The obvious sexual tension between the two of them often had me going “JUST KISS ALREADY,” which is surely the sign of a great romance novel. The attraction between the two of them is palpable, and the scorching pay-off doesn’t disappoint once they act on it. Also, in what felt like a special little treat just for me and my enjoyment of epistolary fiction, there’s also frequent social media and news coverage of Chloe and Inés’s careers and their relationship in the public eye.
My only complaint when it came to Set Point is that I felt like the resolution of Chloe’s character arc at the very end felt a little bit rushed and uneven. Chloe isn’t always the most likable character in that her reactions to stress, depression, and the weight of heavy expectations her parents put on her often manifests in angry reactions to her own failure. It does give her complications and depth as a character, and her relationship with Inés is given real emotional weight through the way that Inés’s support allows Chloe to channel the energy of her rage in healthier ways. On the other hand, I felt like some of Chloe’s development was a little uneven near the end and there was one moment where I felt like her emotional reaction could have been better used to showcase her growth over the story.
Despite that, I still had a lot of fun with Set Point and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a sapphic sports romance with plenty of tension on and off the court.
Note: I received an ARC of this book from Edelweiss.
Representation: bisexual main character with depression, lesbian main character
Content warnings: alcohol consumption, controlling parenting, toxic fan culture, physical assault, manipulation of power, discussion of past mental illness struggles
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