A teenage girl waits in the heat outside a practice court at Wimbledon with a school project and a list of questions, and the woman the entire internet has spent a year calling toxic stops mid-drill to answer all of them, then apologises for keeping her in the sun. It is a small scene, three pages at most, and it explains the whole of A Summer of Stars by Liana Cincotti: a novel about the enormous gap between a person and the story printed about her.
The Headlines Get to Speak First
Every chapter of A Summer of Stars by Liana Cincotti opens with a tabloid headline. “Why Everyone Hates Luna Aldridge.” “Aldridge Avoids Public and Plays Victim.” “Kieran Alexander Finds Another New Fling.” The reader meets each scene as gossip before meeting it as fact, and the effect accumulates into something close to irritation, which appears to be the design.
Luna Aldridge is twenty-six, has eleven singles titles and no US Open, and has just watched her ranking collapse from six to seventy-four after eight months away. Her ex-husband, the world’s most popular male player, gave an interview describing her as toxic and released a recording of her screaming at him down the phone. Seven sponsors left. The one that stayed sells jewellery under the slogan Love, It Sparkles, and it would like her photographed in a relationship. The candidate her publicist selects is Kieran Alexander, an actor with a romance film to promote and a reputation for never committing to anyone, who was overheard three years ago describing her as a narcissistic athlete playing the most pretentious sport available.
Cincotti alternates their first-person chapters, and the alternation does real work. Luna’s prose is crowded with simile, sometimes to excess; Kieran’s is quieter and mostly consists of him noticing things about her he would rather not. Each of them is confidently wrong about the other for roughly two hundred pages, and the reader watches the misreading from above.
The Spanish House Is Where A Summer of Stars by Liana Cincotti Comes Alive
The fake relationship is competently built. The family material is something else.
Kieran’s full name is Kieran Alexander Alvarez, and he surrendered the second half of it, along with his black hair, at eighteen, because that was what his father charged him for permission to leave the family restaurant in Valencia for drama school in New York. The novel keeps this quiet for half its length and then opens the door on a house full of siblings, neighbours’ children, a bread-stealing dog and a grandmother in remission who emails her grandson every article ever printed about him, including the ones about his sex life, and maintains a ranked list of the women he is rumoured to be seeing.
The best scene in the book takes place on that family’s back deck at six in the morning, when Luna, who has spent the novel apologising for existing, tells a man three times her stubbornness exactly what he has done to his son. It is not a romantic scene. It is the moment her arc turns.
A second scene, later, deserves equal credit. Luna is about to play the younger woman her husband slept with, and Cincotti sets it up for a confrontation and then simply refuses. What happens instead involves masking tape, a pair of shoelaces and a figure skater’s trick, and it hands the other woman an interior life that this genre almost never bothers to give her.
The Tennis in A Summer of Stars by Liana Cincotti Is Not Tennis
An author’s note at the front concedes that the sport is not accurately represented and points readers to the WTA’s own site for the real thing. Credit for the honesty; it does not solve the problem.
Roland-Garros is played after Wimbledon, and Madrid after that, an ordering that appears on no calendar anywhere. A player ranked seventy-four reaches a Wimbledon final unseeded. Five consecutive Wimbledon titles are claimed for a twenty-six-year-old who turned professional five years ago. None of this would matter in a book that used the sport as background, but the comeback is the plot, so the reader is repeatedly asked to feel stakes that the mechanics cannot support. The match scenes themselves are written with genuine physical energy, and that makes the invented scaffolding around them more of a shame, not less.
The novel is on much firmer ground with what the tour does to a woman off the court. The scrutiny described here, the appearance policing, the assumption that a female athlete’s private life is public property, is the part the book gets right, and organisations like Women in Sport have been documenting that pressure for years.
Where It Falters
Four things keep A Summer of Stars by Liana Cincotti from the book it could have been, and only one of them is the sport.
- Jeremiah is a cardboard villain. The ex-husband is contemptible on every page he occupies and never once complicates. Because he is never a person, the year Luna spent doubting herself reads as an error rather than a trap, which undercuts the argument the novel wants to make.
- The grudge rests on a lost letter. Three years of hatred hinge on an apology that did not arrive, and the explanation lands so late and so neatly that it functions as repair rather than revelation.
- The middle repeats itself. Premiere, argument, near-kiss, retreat. Four or five times, across roughly a hundred pages, with the schedule doing the work that tension should.
- The supporting team blurs. Six colleagues are introduced with a bracketed age, job and hobby apiece, and several stay inside the bracket.
None of it sinks the book, because the comedy keeps arriving. A running joke about hiring a geriatric assassin, a croquet match Luna refuses to lose, two ice creams dropped in the same evening, a woman climbing a fence in tennis whites to retrieve balls hit by a man who cannot hit a forehand. Cincotti has said she wants to bring back the register of early-2000s romantic comedy, and in these stretches she does.
Where It Leaves You
The romance itself is warm rather than urgent, and the heat is moderate: the kissing is written at length, the sex fades at the door. Readers should know going in that infidelity appears on the page, and that an ex-partner’s sustained harassment, including unwanted physical contact, runs through the whole book.
What lingers after A Summer of Stars by Liana Cincotti is not the couple. It is the thesis, which the dedication states outright and the novel then earns: that being a people-pleaser and a perfectionist at once is a way of handing strangers the keys to your own life. Luna wins her tournament, which is satisfying. She stops needing twenty thousand people to agree that she deserved to, which is the actual ending.
If You Finish This and Need Something Else
Readers who took to A Summer of Stars by Liana Cincotti for the arrangement rather than the sport should try The Bodyguard Affair by Amy Lea, which handles celebrity proximity with a sharper comic edge, or Just for the Cameras by Meghan Quinn for a broader, sillier take on performing a relationship for an audience. Those who want the athlete’s interior life rendered seriously will do better with Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Carrie Soto Is Back, the tennis novel this one declines to be. And for the specific pleasure of a story told through the press coverage of it, Elissa Sussman’s Funny You Should Ask pulls the same trick with an interview transcript and a movie star. Cincotti’s own first novel, Picking Daisies on Sundays, was self-published and shows where the voice began.