Growing up isn’t easy. You feel different, odd. You’re not like everyone else. You don’t belong in this world. Through short vignettes, each a moment in time at a specific date and age, Susannah Dickey’s debut novel Tennis Lessons takes you through the moments that build a life.
Dead pets, crashed cars, failed relationships and family traumas. This exciting books takes us through them all as one young woman navigates the path to adulthood.
Told in the second person, it’s intense, an interior focus that drags you right into the heart of the action and emotion. It’s the character, rather than any plot, which hangs the whole thing together – a clever and difficult move. Spanning twenty five years it’s a novel that looks at how we are shaped by our experiences, each fragment and moment bouncing along, with no clear trajectory in sight at the start. Anxiety, frailty and vulnerability all exist at the same time as nights out and fun with friends, in that juxtaposed way that all lives are built of.
Susannah Dickey is a writer from Derry-Londonderry, Northern Ireland. She is the author of two poetry pamphlets, I had some very slight concerns (The Lifeboat, 2017) and genuine human values (The Lifeboat, 2018). In 2017 she was the winner of the inaugural Verve Poetry Festival competition. Her debut novel, Tennis Lessons, will be published by Doubleday in July 2020.

Tennis Lessons is a coming of age novel about growing up in the modern world, told in the second person. The narrative follows the unnamed female narrator as she grows up from childhood to her late twenties, feeling strange and wrong and always being the weird one. School friendships, family death, sexual assault, trauma, moving on, and not doing what you imagined all form part of the novel as it moves through her life, never lingering too long on any episode though a few pivotal moments get longer than other parts.

The second person narration takes a while to get into, but after that it isn't really noticeable and feels quite similar to first person narration in terms of getting only a specific picture of the protagonist and not anything wider. The novel captures a lot of the complexity of life in terms of emotion and sometimes grim but mundane realities, and the use of time jumps throughout the novel works well to pose questions and not give every step in the protagonist's life too obviously. The down side of the general atmosphere is that it can be hard to not wish you could change what was happening, to improve things in some way. Her friendship with her best friend is hopeful though, and it is good to see it as something that runs throughout the book even as the narrative speeds through her twenties.

Tennis Lessons is an intriguing book, quick to read and with an ambiguity about exactly how things had affected the protagonist. It feels similar to other novels focused on a young woman growing up and navigating trauma, though the chronological journey from early childhood stood out as something a bit different. Not one if you're expecting things to come together, but it is a book that vividly paints its protagonist and captures some of the complexities of growing up.

This is a strange book and I have to say that I didn't warm to the story or the characters. It's written in a series of episodes in the life of a young woman beginning when she is not much more than a toddler and ending when she is approaching thirty. The episodes are dated by her age at the time and all of them are fairly fragmentary, although some are slightly longer than others.

We never learn her name and the story is written entirely in the second person so, 'you' wake-up, 'you' are seven years old and 'you' do so and so. It provides a limited perspective perhaps as a means of adding authenticity. It also means that we never get any external view of this character.

The things that happen to her are not intended to be extraordinary but they are unremittingly gloomy. When she is a child her parents are arguing and her mother is neurotic. When she's a teenager, everyone hates her. When she has exams, she flunks them and then becomes an unsettled university dropout with a menial job. That's bad enough without a constant emphasis on 'things below' not working as they should and that's not to mention her infected foot, the drink and the frequent vomiting. And I should mention that her adult friends appear to be grown-up versions of the horrible teenagers.

The trouble with this is that we don't know what she actually is like. She hates herself and everything about her and isn't exactly keen on anything that happens so we don't know if she's dreadfully ugly or a psychiatric case. I think we are meant to think that she is just every woman, lacking in self-esteem, full of self-doubt and with things being made worse by other women but if that is the case it is a very pessimistic story.

It's fashionable these days to write books about failing women with chaotic lives in a sort of vaguely humorous way and with the hope that Hugh Grant will turn up before the end of the novel! Maybe this book is an attempt to show some of these women as they really are but the end result is to suggest that, yes, everything really is awful and you might as well slit your throat right now!

I suppose that is at the heart of what I didn't like. The book is so negative about being a girl and a woman, casual about catastrophic sex experiences which are probably rape and constantly implying that you are alone in this world. It's a bleak picture. I hope that women readers won't recognise it as somehow authentic and real and if they do aren't they somehow accepting patriarchy and misogyny as part of a woman's lot? Maybe it is but I prefer stories that fight against it!

This debut novel has been hotly anticipated since it was announced last year. I inhaled it today. Tennis Lessons is a coming of age story which maps the changing landscapes of friendships from childhood through their twenties. Though this novel is fierce in its tackling of issues such as bodily autonomy, sexual violence and trauma. 4/5 ✨