sadly this didn’t work for me.

and interestingly it wasn’t the heavy focus on squash (the sport and where the titel comes from) or the heavy topic of grief with as many can understand is not always something you can read or connect with in every book that has the topic. 

those things were okay. 
i did think that the grief was done relatively well and how it was told with how long and how deeply affected grief can leave you. 

and while i personally have no interest in the sport nor do i seek out reading about any type of sport , i also didn’t mind it overly much even if it was very heavy handed and felt like the author expected the reader to not only have a basic understanding of squash as a hobby but as a profession as well (which i didn’t even know was a thing before this book which says more about my disinterest in professional sport than anything else). 


my biggest issue with the book was that it felt like it didn’t have real characters or any actual people and lives and their stories worth being interested about in it. 
which might sound mean but what i mean is that the characters didn’t feel real - they read bland and more like a wage sketch of a character than a fully formed and developed character that a reader can learn to understand or want to get to know if nothing else- and and with that everything about this story felt just as blend and distant as those characters. 

this book might have talked a lot about grief and what i can do to a person, a family and lives in general but i never felt that grief. 
i didn’t feel the loss and pain and desperation of having to keep going and trying and feeling like its not working but time just keeps on ticking anyways. 

maybe i am just heartless or the  author purposefully kept the reader at a large distance so that the characters felt more like silhouettes than anyone specific or real. 


i don’t know. 

i do know that it wasn’t for me and i didn’t enjoy this book. 

oh well i hope others have a better experience with it.