Check & Mate by Ali Hazelwood
SYNOPSIS
Mallory Greenleaf is done with chess. Every move counts nowadays; after the sport led to the destruction of her family four years earlier, Mallory’s focus is on her mom, her sisters, and the dead-end job that keeps the lights on. Thatis, until she begrudgingly agrees to play in one last charity tournament and inadvertently wipes the board with notorious “Kingkiller” nolan Sawyer: current world champion and reigning Bad Boy of chess.
Nolan’s loss to an unknown rook-ie shocks everyone. What’s even more confusing? His desire to cross pawns again. What kind of gambit is Nolan playing? The smart move would be to walk away. Resign. Game over. But Mallory’s victory opens the door to sorely needed cash-prizes and despite everything, she can’t help feeling drawn to the enigmatic strategist…
As she rockets up the ranks, Mallory struggles to keep her family safely separated from the game that wrecked it in the first place. And as her love for the sport she so desperately wanted to hate begins to rekindle, Mallory quickly realizes that the games aren’t only on the board, the spotlight is brighter than she imagined, and the competition can be fierce (-ly attractive. And intelligent…and infuriating…)
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Ali Hazelwood excels at a very specific type of writing. If you’ve read her fanfic or previous novels, you know exactly what I mean. Which is why, I’m ashamed to say, I had doubts on her being able to keep my interest with a Young Adult novel… Reader… I was wrong. And thankfully so. This might be one of my favourite Hazelwood books, I binged the entire thing on one plane ride. Mallory and her ability to ice people out in protecting her own heart was a little too relatable. Nolan and his steadfast devotion and awe was perfectly on par with the best of Hazelwood’s leading men. It made for such a painfully sweet combination of characters and clashes of wills in this novel that gave the same excitement and intrigue for chess as the early hype days of The Queen’s Gambit. I adored this story.
We follow Mallory in her early days with an interest in chess, witnessing in the prologue her opinion of the famous “Kingkiller” Nolan Sawyer, chess prodigy with a temper. Fast forward and a burnt out Mal is finishing high school, facing anxieties of losing her friends to the university life, struggling to support her family, and feeling lost and stuck in life. Who can’t relate to at least some of that? Now enters a chess tournament her friends are begging her to attend. Mal has given up the sport due to unresolved familial trauma but how can she let her friends down? After accidentally beating the Kingkiller himself, she’s catapulted back into the competitive chess world with all eyes on her, especially Nolan Sawyer’s. Nolan, with no ffamily of his own, can’t seem to help but latch onto Mal and her brilliant chess focused mind. He sees a kindred spirit and she has reignited his love for a game that, lately, has grown stale for him.
Mal was headstrong and a little quirky in the most relatable ways. I know she’s Gen Z but she was giving extreme millenial cringe quite often (as a Zillenial myself, I should know). She is a rock for her family but also a little too much of a martyr. She makes her family her burden and refuses help. I found that stubbornness pretty frustrating at times. She thought of herself and her family and everyone else could go hand, which I found a little hypocritical. So as much as I loved her tenacity, she was definitely the most frustrating character in this book. Her sisters, however, were a delight and I loved getting more of a glimpse into the support system of our main character.
Nolan was our typical Adam Driver variant. Him being a chess prodigy however gave a whole new level of attractiveness. Smart = sexy. He’s a complicated character with a dark past but it doesn’t prevent him from being extremely kind. He’s gentle, understanding, and a little naive. His devotion to a woman who is unable to give her whole heart left quite a bit of pain and angst for the reader. It left a bit of a lopsided dynamic in the relationship as well. However, this imbalance left room for some fantastic character and relationship development.
The pacing of this story was great. The slow burn built tension, Mal’s stubbornness and miscommunication with everyone around her built frustrating and the tension explored at the best moment leaving plenty of time for a healthy and satisfying resolution. I have one…maybe two… complaints…:
Mal is presented as a young chess genius who made the game and its players her obsession and personality for a good portion of her life before she gave it up. Yet I’m to believe she’s unaware of the simplest of rules? She’s bamboozled by there being HUGE monetary prizes at tournaments? Do YOU forget these very obvious an important types of things from YOUR childhood obsessions no matter how long its been? I highly doubt it. That ripped me from the book a few times.
The book ended very abruptly. I ended up googling to see if my ebook was missing pages because the last chapter is one page and just… ends. It wasn’t until I bit the bullet and read the epilogue and figured I’d find the missing pages later that I realized it was meant to be that way. It really yanked me out of the story and left me slightly dissatisfied.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book and I hope Hazelwood writes more YA romance as she’s definitely proven to be able to master the genre. If you like Hazelwood’s works, you’ll definitely love this read. I gave this 4 stars. A longer ending may have been able to round it to a solid 5 star read.