Chessboxer

March 26, 2021

Gr 9 Up-Leah Baxter, a white 17-year-old from Manhattan, is 21 points away from being a chess grandmaster, but lately she's lost her passion for the game. Her father passed away while she was out of town at a tournament two years ago, and now her mom and coach are constantly yelling at her to do better. She quits chess and pours her feelings into a blog. Someone suggests that she become a chess hustler in Central Park, but a viral video of her trouncing a current grandmaster leads to a police sting, where she is arrested. An off-handed comment at the arraignment introduces the term chessboxing. Leah becomes obsessed and undertakes the journey to become a chessboxer. The sport is brutal: a round of chess and a round of boxing, repeated until a KO or checkmate. Could this possibly be the outlet for Leah's grief-fueled rage, or will it be just another way that she fails not just herself but everyone around her? Leah is hard to sympathize with and her narration is overly detailed with chess terms. The plot drags-chessboxing isn't introduced until halfway through the book-though the boxing scenes are exciting. VERDICT An additional purchase for collections where patrons have an interest in chess.-Melyssa Kenney, Parkville H.S., MD

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Starred review from March 1, 2021
A grieving chess prodigy ups her game. "Intelligence and irritability are a bad combination," writes 17-year-old Leah--and she should know. Massive quantities of both drive her to not only quit tournament chess just as she's about to score a grandmaster rating, but also, in the two years since her father's death, to mercilessly savage anyone who tries to get close to her. The game won't let her go, though, and after some lucrative but painful experiences as a chess hustler in Washington Square Park, she finds a perfect outlet for her passion and rage in chessboxing--an actual sport alternating timed rounds of boxing and chess. Readers who regard chess as a genteel, cerebral pursuit are in for a shock as the game action (described with technical precision) is presented in language as compellingly tense and brutal as that of the rings. Readers will also admire the new friends and adult supporters (including a grief therapist) who are willing to look past Leah's caustic shell. Eventually she's taking on Zelda "The Reaper" Haas, a scary opponent tattooed up to and including the eyeballs, for the women's world championship. Told through blog posts, Leah's narrative seethes with raw feelings and combines taut suspense with dizzying lows and highs, even occasional hilarity, as it tracks her progress toward learning to live with herself and with devastating loss. The main cast presents White. A rising, rousing bout fueled by brains, brawn, and belligerency. (afterword) (Fiction. 13-18)

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