lara_lleverino 's review for:

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis

3.0

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This books was both excellent and monumentally disappointing. I love books about chess. I don’t play but I love the intrigue and strategy. I picked this up after seeing the ads for the Netflix series I haven’t watched. This was also the story of a genius those are fun too and a sort of rags to riches but that was where it fell short. The true poverty in the main character’s life was not in money but in the things that truly matter; family, friendships and experiences. Beth has only one consuming experience and that is chess. She even has a brush with faith and religion but she brushes them off as fake compared to her religion of chess. As the story ends one wonders, skeptically if the experience of chess will continue to satisfy in the face of all her other deficits. Also the sexual content was anomalistically base and even criminal. It reminded me of Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. I never felt like Lisbeth would feel the deficit of her life choices but I think Beth in this book will.

Trigger warning: there is child sexual abuse in this book.