Check & Mate ✩✩✩✩✩
I am an Ali Hazelwood STAN. This woman knows how to write a hilarious, cheeks-hurt-from-smiling-so-much rom com that you put down and immediately wish you could pick up again for the first time again.
I’ve read all of Ali’s books and I have loved every single one of them – most, in fact, I’ve read in a single sitting because I loved them THAT much – but I was nervous about this one.
The premise seemed great – right up my alley, really – but lately, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Young Adult books. I’ve always been a YA reader and lover, but I’ve noticed (much to my dismay) that the older I get, the more trouble I have connecting with young protagonists. Their problems seem mundane to me and their emotional reactions can infuriate me. I was also nervous because Ali is such an incredible adult romance writer so I was scared that wouldn’t translate to the page as well in a YA story.
But Ali Hazelwood in Check and Mate slashed away all my pre-reading fears.
I started this book at 10pm on a Sunday night, the night before I started my new position at work after getting a promotion, and I explicitly set an alarm for 11pm to STOP READING because I wanted to be well rested before work.
When that alarm went off at 11 though, I snoozed it once… twice.. three times before just turning it off completely. Next thing I knew, it was 2am and I was closing the book with a goofy grin on my face.
The book is about an eighteen year old girl named Mallory Greenleaf, an incredible chess player who has given up playing the game. She is a strong-willed, independent young woman who puts her family and their needs above her own, and at the beginning of the book, she begrudgingly agrees to play in a charity chess tournament. At the tournament, she beats the current world champion chess player Nolan Sawyer and so begins Mallory’s journey back into the world of chess and toward the romance she least expected.
This book was hilarious, with fantastic pop culture references which were done so seamlessly that it was okay even if you didn’t know what pop icons were being referred to, and what impressed me the most was that the book had DEPTH.
These were fully fleshed out characters who made you just keep flipping the page to see what could possibly happen next.
Ali Hazelwood is a POWERHOUSE, and if I could give this book more than 5/5 stars, I would. If you haven’t read this book yet, grab a copy now!
Anchored Musings 