‘Team Spirit’ by RJ Gould

Team Spirit: a humorous take on tennis club turmoil

Everything seems straightforward enough with agreement reached for the tennis club to hold social events at the nearby Dream Café while the clubhouse is being rebuilt.

When Oliver Kilroy is forced to resign as club chairman after taking a bribe from the builder, Laurie, his young and inexperienced deputy, is left in charge of running the club. He accepts the post on condition that the attractive Helen is prepared to support him as the new deputy.

The pair are faced with an unprecedented run of challenges. The builder is failing to deliver on time. A player’s dubious line calls are infuriating opponents. The WhatsApp group has become a hotbed of slanderous gossip. A middle-aged flirt is antagonising the female members. And poor behaviour at the Dream Café is threatening the agreement.

Helen and Laurie are struggling to cope, though tennis club problems are a distant second for Helen as she attempts to start a relationship with Laurie. She’s sure he also wants that but something major is going on in his life to prevent progress. What is that something and can it be overcome?

RJ Gould and I are that rarest of things: a pair of chaps willing to admit to a fondness for the romance genre. In my case, this usually amounts to an over enthusiasm for the ouvre of Hugh Grant, in Gould’s membership of the UK Romantic Novelists Association and novels such as ‘Dream Café’ which I reviewed back in 2021 and declared, “nice romantic comedy which nips along with ease of reading and light touch charm”, a view I would echo in ‘Team Spirit’.

We are back in the same milleau of the ‘Dream Café’ characters – now the fourth in the series which is in and of itself quite an achievement, and the locations and characters are as comfortable as an old jacket.

Which is not so true of the plot and writing which does a brilliant job of reflecting the spikiness, petty jealousies and simmering rivalries of small English places with a stiletto blade. All the social niceties employed, hiding the drinking problems, the hatred and the tensions. Gould is an accomplished skewerer of the seamy sides of English life: and what better location in a summer in need of sun than a tennis club?

A welcome addition to the series and a fine addition for the small male fan club of the romance genre persuasion.

Author Bio –

R J Gould writes contemporary fiction about relationships using a mix of wry humour and pathos to describe the tragi-comic life journeys of his protagonists. Team Spirit is his tenth novel and the fourth in the stand-alone ‘at the Dream Café’ series. He has been published by Headline Accent and Lume Books and also self-publishes. Before becoming a full-time author he worked in the education and charity sectors. In addition to his addiction to telling stories, he has somewhat milder addictions to playing tennis, watching film noir cinema, completing Wordle and eating dried mango slices. He is a member of Cambridge Writers, Society of Authors and the Romantic Novelists’ Association UK. He lives in Cambridge, England.

Social Media Links –

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