Book Review: Check & Mate

I have loved all of Ali Hazelwood’s STEM romance books so when she announced last year that she was coming out with her first YA romance, I knew I had to read it! Check & Mate is an upper YA romance set in the chess world. I read it last week finally and I loved it!

The novel follows Mallory Greenleaf who just graduated from high school. Despite receiving some scholarships to schools, Mallory decides not to go to college and instead work because her family is struggling financially due to her mom’s health issues and her dad not being around (we slowly find out what happened with her dad as the novel goes on). When Mallory helps her best friend out by participating in a chess tournament, she shocks everyone by beating the number 1 chess player in the world, Nolan Shaw, aka the “Kingkiller”. Mallory played chess throughout her childhood and was very good, but something happened that made her stop playing and swear she would never play again. Even winning against Nolan doesn’t convince her to continue playing. It’s not until Defne, the founder of a chess club in New York City, approaches her and offers to pay her a a very nice salary to take a chess fellowship at her club, and she realizes how much money is involved in the cash prizes at the various national and international tournaments that Mallory is convinced to play chess again.

Mallory loves chess more than anything, but whatever it is in her past has her denying her love for it and trying to convincing herself that she’s only doing it to provide for her family. Meanwhile, Nolan is the top player in the world, but all he wants is to play chess with Mallory again.

I loved this book so much! Mallory was such a good character and definitely not perfect, but she was so relatable in so many ways. Nolan was perfection with his personality that comes off as grumpy/cold at first and then you realize he’s not like that at all. It was such a good he falls first book! There is a lot of chess talk in this book and pretty much all of it went over my head, but the story is so good that I was fully invested and felt like I was living in this book.

This is marketed as YA, but I would say it’s definitely upper YA as there are some steamy scenes and a good bit of sex talk, but nothing too detailed or graphic so still in the YA sphere.

Anyway, I loved this book and I hope Ali Hazelwood writes more YA!

Read this if you want a enemies/rivals to lovers, slow burn YA

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