Sideline Confidential
Ordinarily, my instinct would not be to pick something like this up. But with my love of Audiobrary and its mission to keep audiobooks real and compensate authors and narrators fairly, their company got it on my radar. The description intrigued me and Julia Whelan's narration sold me on it.
Blake is a sideline reporter for the NFL. She's graduated from USC and landed her dream job back home for the team she grew up watching with her dad. The problem is, as a female, she's constantly questioned about whether she's there "for the right reasons." Does she even like football? Is she here to distract and flirt with the players?
The experiences our main character has in this book felt so realistic, especially with more recent incidents in professional sports. I was surprised by some of the imagined scenarios, but actually not surprised at all by them. I can imagine what a tough gig it might be to enter this world as a woman. Blake makes her fair share of mistakes and missteps throughout the novel, but she learns from them and grows as a character. The worst of the perpetrators get their comeuppance. And I loved the way Blake interacts with her supportive and loving parents. Sometimes her dad seemed to question whether everything Blake faced was because of her gender or just her newness to the career; this made Blake unsure for a while as well. But I liked this about the book. Rather than a simple path, we get a nuanced support from her parents that felt more genuine than contrived.
With the meteoric rise of sports romance books, I should say, this is not one (although Sarah Adams's, The Rule Book, definitely had some similar themes. Go there for an adjacent story about a female sports agent with ALL the romance tropes.) What you'll find here is a story of a woman's fight to know herself and her worth in a male-dominated field.
I'd recommend the audiobook and highly recommend it from Audiobrary because who doesn't want an extra 45 minute interview with the author about her actual experiences with being a sideline reporter? (the book is fictional, but she compiled some of her own memories and those of colleagues as inspiration). There was even a little sneak peak about Bentley's next idea for a novel and I'll be here for it!
