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Verdict: A professional-tennis rivals-to-lovers romance with real researched detail and real chemistry, undercut by a co-lead’s temper arc that a trade reviewer and readers alike call rushed at the finish.
Best for: Readers who want tennis treated with real specificity and a low-angst rivals-to-partners arc, and who can forgive an ending that resolves one heroine’s growth too fast.
Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — romance.io’s “explicit open door”)
Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.7/5 — a 3.77 Goodreads average, marked down for a resolution that Kirkus and reader reviews both call rushed)
Tropes: Rivals-to-lovers, sports romance, forced proximity, only one bed, dual POV, pro-athlete romance, celebrity romance, series romance, low angst, standalone-friendly.
Set Point by Meg Jones is the third book in the sports romance series Game, Set, and Match, a traditionally published contemporary sapphic romance from Avon (Penguin Michael Joseph in the UK) that follows Inés Costa, a Spanish former Grand Slam prodigy sidelined by injury and stripped of her biggest sponsor, as she is forced onto the same side of the net as Chloe Murphy, the volatile American phenom who took that sponsorship — and who then offers to fund Inés’s US Open comeback in exchange for becoming her hitting partner and reining in her own temper.
It carries a 3.77 average across more than 1,300 Goodreads ratings, arrived with a starred-sounding trade pickup from Publishers Weekly and a more skeptical Kirkus notice, and splits along a specific line: readers praise the tennis detail and the chemistry, then converge on the same complaint about how fast the book resolves Chloe’s temper. Both halves are worth understanding before you start.
What Is Set Point About?
Set Point sits squarely inside contemporary sports romance rather than using sport as backdrop: it runs across a real professional tennis season, closing at the US Open, and the tour’s sponsorship economics, ranking pressure and code-violation politics are the actual reason its two leads get forced together. That procedural detail is what draws readers to the sports romance shelf wanting a sport explained rather than gestured at, and it’s what Publishers Weekly singled out as the novel’s clearest strength.
Inés Costa is a former Grand Slam champion who has spent two years losing to injury and her own shrinking bank account, and who has just watched her biggest sponsor walk to the woman who beat her. Chloe Murphy has the opposite problem: talent enough to be the tour’s next headline name and none of the composure, with broken rackets and code violations eating the “favorite” status her game has already earned. The book runs dual first-person POV, split close to evenly, which lets a reader watch both the coaching Inés provides and the temper Chloe is meant to be learning to manage from the inside.
What Makes This Sapphic Sports Romance Work
- The tennis: Reviewers on Amazon, romance.io and in the trade press single out the tour-level detail — sponsorship, seeding, code violations — as more convincing than most romances that use a sport as a setting.
- No third-act breakup: Named specifically and repeatedly as a relief. One UK reviewer flags a chapter ending that telegraphs a split that never arrives, and calls the low angst a comfort-read asset.
- The forced-proximity chemistry: The hitting-partner arrangement gives the banter somewhere to live before either admits what it is, and readers consistently name a wine-bar scene as the point the tension lands.
- The chapter-opening playlist: Each chapter leads with a queer song pick, and multiple reviewers call it an unusually fun, immersive touch.
- Series connectivity without a toll gate: Nico and Scottie from Clean Point and Dylan and Oliver from Game Point return, rewarding existing readers, while a Lesbrary reviewer who started here confirms it works as a way in.
Book Synopsis
Two years ago, Inés Costa was the player everyone expected to own the next decade of women’s tennis. Now she is grinding through qualifying rounds on a surgically repaired wrist, watching her ranking slide, and doing the math on how much longer her savings can cover a coach and a physio. The final insult arrived months ago: the sponsor who built her name is now paying Chloe Murphy instead.
Chloe is everything the tour’s marketing team wants and everything its officials dread. She is twenty-two, ferociously talented, and one more thrown racket away from a suspension that could cost her the season. When the two are unexpectedly paired for a doubles exhibition, the hostility everyone predicts does not fully materialize — and Chloe, watching Inés absorb a crowd’s cruelty without losing her composure, makes an offer neither of them saw coming. She will bankroll Inés’s run at the US Open. In exchange, Inés becomes her hitting partner, and — much less officially — the person tasked with teaching her how to survive a bad line call without breaking a racket over it.
What starts as a transaction turns into a summer of practice courts, hotel circuits and shared frustration at press rooms that would rather cover their rivalry than their partnership. Inés’s game starts coming back. Chloe’s temper starts, unevenly, to hold. And somewhere between drills and tour stops, both of them start noticing things about the other that have nothing to do with tennis — while a set of forces neither one controls, from sponsors to fans to family, keeps building toward the summer’s actual test at Flushing Meadows.
My Review
Start with what the book gets right: the tennis in Set Point is specific in a way this trope rarely bothers to be. Jones spent two years developing the concept before writing a word, and it shows in the ranking mechanics, sponsorship pressure and code-violation politics that actually drive the plot. Publishers Weekly picked up on exactly this, and so does nearly every reader review I read — the sport does real narrative work, not backdrop.
The chemistry holds up its end too. The forced-proximity setup gives Inés and Chloe somewhere to be sharp with each other before either admits what the tension is, and readers name a wine-bar scene again and again as the point it stops being subtext. It also helps that the book refuses the genre’s most tired device: no third-act breakup, which reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic call out as a relief.
Where it struggles is Chloe’s arc, and it’s not a minority complaint — it’s the one place a trade reviewer and an independent sapphic-romance blog land on the identical word. Kirkus says Chloe’s redemption “feels too sudden,” earned by proximity rather than any real reckoning with racket-throwing and code violations serious enough to threaten her career; Lesbrary calls the resolution “a little bit rushed and uneven.” Amazon and Goodreads reviews back both up: several call a scene where Chloe throws a racket and a water bottle at Inés over a friendship bracelet genuinely too far, and more than one says the first half sags before that conflict ignites. A quieter complaint runs alongside it — Inés reads as a supporting player in Chloe’s growth, and a subplot involving Chloe’s parents is raised and never confronted on the page.
One expectation worth resetting: romance.io rates the heat “explicit open door” at 4/5, higher than several readers report. Multiple romance.io reviewers call the spice “relatively tame” and “vanilla,” free of real kink content. If you came for a wall-to-wall 5/5, recalibrate.
My honest note: A well-researched, chemistry-driven sports romance that earns its low-angst reputation, let down by an ending that rushes the one arc doing the most work. If you can live with Chloe’s redemption arriving faster than it’s earned, the tennis and the partnership are worth the trip.
| Element | In Set Point |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Inés Costa & Chloe Murphy — sidelined Spanish former prodigy and hot-headed American rising star, rivals-to-lovers |
| Core tropes | Rivals-to-lovers, forced proximity, only one bed, dual POV, pro-athlete romance, celebrity romance, no third-act breakup |
| Setting | The professional women’s tennis tour, contemporary — a summer season culminating at the US Open |
| Heat level | 4/5 — romance.io’s “explicit open door,” though several readers report it running milder |
| Series | Game, Set, and Match book 3 of 4 — works as a standalone; book 4 (Match Point) arrives August 2027 |
| Content notes | Explicit sexual content, on-page anger and thrown objects, online harassment and toxic fan culture, biphobia, parental pressure and estrangement, past child neglect, sports injury, alcohol use |
How Spicy Is Set Point?
romance.io places Set Point at 4/5 on its steam scale, labeled “explicit open door” — its second-highest band. That number comes from a small sample (17 ratings, against the book’s much larger Goodreads base), so treat it as directional rather than definitive.
The one thing worth flagging in advance is exactly that romance.io number against what individual readers report. Two romance.io reviewers who logged detailed spice notes rated the book 2/5 and 3/5 on their own scales, describing it as “vanilla monogamous,” free of kink content, and running to roughly three open-door scenes — and at least one Amazon reviewer says plainly she wished it had more heat. No reviewer flags anything beyond conventional open-door content; the gap here is intensity, not content. If this band works for you, Gold and Rewind It Back sit at the same 4/5 level.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you want professional tennis rendered with real procedural detail, you prefer low-angst rivals-to-lovers without a manufactured breakup, you like forced proximity built on a genuine professional arrangement, and you don’t mind an ending that resolves faster than it should for one lead.
You may want to skip it if: you need both halves of a dual-POV romance to get equal weight, you want a serious anger-management arc actually confronted rather than smoothed over, you were hoping for a full 5/5 heat level, or you have limited patience for subplots that get raised and left unresolved.
In short: a genuinely tennis-literate, low-angst rivals romance that asks you to forgive its ending more than its middle.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (September 2026)
There is no viral BookTok moment behind this one, and a search of Reddit’s usual sapphic-romance communities turns up no organic discussion thread — both worth naming as findings, since Jones’s public presence runs through Instagram rather than TikTok. What’s actually happening is more conventional: a same-day audiobook release from Avon, positive advance coverage from Publishers Weekly, a more mixed Kirkus notice, and a steady stream of NetGalley ARC reviews feeding Goodreads and romance.io around the April 2026 release. The audiobook, narrated by Lindsey Dorcus and Elena Rey across 11 hours 50 minutes, is a real part of how readers experience this book — several describe switching to audio mid-read and say the narration kept them in the story.
Prefer audio? Listen to Set Point on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The tennis, first and most consistently — reviewers repeatedly call the sponsorship and ranking detail the most convincing version of this trope they’ve read. Low-angst structure comes next, with “no third-act breakup” named often enough to read as a selling point. The chapter-opening playlist gets singled out as unusually fun, and several readers name a friendship-bracelet detail as genuinely moving. The narration has real fans — Dorcus and Rey are both praised for distinguishing two voices, though opinion splits on accent work: one reviewer calls the Spanish-inflected performance strong and the other narrator’s Spanish weaker, while another found the two voices too similar. A minority wanted more heat than the book delivers, notable since it cuts against romance.io’s official 4/5 band.
What readers argue about and complain about: Chloe’s resolution, above everything — the one point where Kirkus and reader reviews land on the same word, “rushed.” Several cite a scene where Chloe throws a racket and a water bottle at Inés over a friendship bracelet as a genuine red flag, not rom-com messiness, and say the ending resolves her temper faster than earned. Second: Inés increasingly reads as a supporting player in Chloe’s growth rather than an equal lead. Third: subplot load — a press-leak storyline and an online-harassment storyline both draw praise for feeling authentic to women’s sports, but a family-estrangement thread involving Chloe’s parents is raised and, by at least one account, never confronted on the page. A smaller thread flags pacing, the first half “felt a little off” for more than one reviewer; a StoryGraph did-not-finish figure was not accessible on the book’s page at the time of writing.
The series question everyone should ask first: Set Point is book three of four, and it resolves cleanly — complete arc, earned HEA, no cliffhanger. A Lesbrary reviewer who started the series here confirms it “can easily be read as a starting point,” and romance.io tags it an “interconnected standalone.” The series isn’t finished: book four, Match Point, arrives August 19, 2027, following a different couple — a second-chance reunion between a Scottish player and an Italian champion — rather than continuing Inés and Chloe’s story. Clean Point (3.73) and Game Point (3.79) both sit close to where this one lands.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Set Point end on a cliffhanger?
No. The romance resolves completely with an HEA, and readers consistently describe it as working as a standalone entry point.
Do I need to read Clean Point and Game Point first?
No. Characters from both make return appearances, but a Lesbrary reviewer who started here confirms it works fine as a first read, and romance.io tags it an interconnected standalone.
How spicy is Set Point?
romance.io rates it 4/5, “explicit open door.” Several reader reviews rate the actual heat noticeably lower — “relatively tame” and “vanilla” both appear — so calibrate toward moderate rather than maximum spice.
Is the Game, Set, and Match series finished?
No. This is book three of a planned four. Book four, Match Point, arrives August 19, 2027, centering a different couple in a second-chance storyline.
Is Set Point enemies-to-lovers or rivals-to-lovers?
Rivals-to-lovers is the more accurate label, and it’s how Amazon, romance.io and Publishers Weekly all describe it. The hostility is professional and competitive rather than personal or cruel.
Is there an audiobook?
Yes — narrated by Lindsey Dorcus and Elena Rey, running 11 hours 50 minutes, released the same day as the print edition. It’s on Libro.fm, and several readers say the narration carried them through slower stretches.
If You Loved Set Point, Read These Next
Readers who want the same tour-level specificity at the same heat should look at Gold, which runs its own rivals/age-gap engine through a different sport at the same 4/5 heat. For another low-angst sports romance built around a second chance rather than a rivalry, Rewind It Back is the closer comparison. And for the same professional-athlete pressure in a different sport’s locker room, try Onside Play.
For more in this register, browse our complete sapphic sports romance guide or the full Book Reviews collection.
The Bottom Line
Set Point is a sports romance that does its homework. The tennis is specific enough to convince readers who know the sport, the forced-proximity chemistry between Inés and Chloe earns its slow burn, and the refusal to manufacture a third-act breakup is a real mercy. It also lets one heroine’s most serious flaw — a temper that costs her sponsors and threatens her career — get resolved by proximity rather than reckoning, and leaves a family subplot hanging unfinished. Whether that trade is worth it depends on how much you need a redemption arc earned rather than implied — but a tennis-literate, low-angst rivals romance with real chemistry is exactly what this delivers. Check Set Point on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, Set Point ranks as a well-researched contemporary sapphic sports romance — genuinely specific about professional tennis and confidently low-angst, held back by a rushed final stretch for its more volatile lead, and best approached for the rivalry and the sport rather than a fully balanced dual arc.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★★☆ 3.7/5
- ✓ 3.77 average across 1,300+ Goodreads ratings
- ✓ Tennis specificity and chemistry carry it
- ✓ Kirkus and readers independently call the ending rushed
- ✓ Amazon runs half a star higher, 4.2
Romance ★★★★☆ 4.0/5
- ✓ Forced-proximity chemistry widely praised
- ✓ No third-act breakup, named as a relief
- ✓ Wine-bar scene cited repeatedly as the turn
- ✓ Inés reads as the less-equal half of the arc
Characters ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5
- ✓ Dual POV shows Chloe’s temper from the inside
- ✓ Inés’s financial and injury pressure feels real
- ✓ Returning cast rewards series readers
- ✓ Kirkus flags the supporting cast as confusingly large
Writing ★★★★☆ 3.7/5
- ✓ Publishers Weekly praises the banter and prose
- ✓ Chapter-opening playlist praised as fun, not gimmicky
- ✓ Sports procedural detail rendered convincingly
- ✓ One review flags “telling” over “showing” in places
Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 3.9/5
- ✓ Online harassment and toxic fan culture read as authentic
- ✓ Financial precarity gives Inés’s arc real stakes
- ✓ Friendship-bracelet detail singled out as moving
- ✓ Chloe’s family conflict raised but left unresolved
Heat Level ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ romance.io band: “explicit open door”
- ✓ Roughly three open-door scenes per reader logs
- ✓ No reviewer flags concerning kink content
- ✓ Readers self-rate the actual heat noticeably milder
Ending ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ Complete arc, earned HEA, no cliffhanger
- ✓ Confirmed workable as a series starting point
- ✓ Sets up book four without gating this one
- ✓ Chloe’s redemption called rushed by trade and readers alike
Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ Audiobook praised as a strong second pass
- ✓ Series cameos reward a return visit
- ✓ Tennis detail rewards fans of the sport specifically
- ✓ Readers rank it below the series’ first two books
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