Check & Mate

Check & Mate is Ali Hazelwood’s first novel aimed at a YA audience, and the shift is instructive. The adult novels — The Love Hypothesis, Love on the Brain — are set in graduate school and research facilities, with protagonists whose primary anxieties are professional. Here, Mallory Greenleaf’s anxiety is more immediate: her father disappeared, her mother has health problems, and her younger siblings need things that require money she doesn’t have.

The chess backdrop is well-chosen. Competitive chess is simultaneously an elite intellectual pursuit and a world of obsessive, eccentric personalities — and it is, crucially, one of the few competitive domains where a young woman can genuinely threaten the world’s best players on pure merit. Mallory’s casual game against Nolan Sawyer — the world’s top-ranked player, two years earlier, at a tournament she attended for reasons that had nothing to do with competition — is the inciting incident: she beats him, is terrified by her own ability, and walks away from chess entirely.

Hazelwood clearly did her research. The psychology of competitive chess — the ways different players approach the game, the particular mental exhaustion of high-level tournament play, the social dynamics of a world that is still processing its recent inclusion of women at the top level — is rendered with real depth. The chess scenes work as both sport and metaphor.

The romance follows a slightly different pattern than the adult novels. Nolan’s interest in Mallory is more openly signalled earlier, which means less of the sustained obliviousness that can exhaust readers of Hazelwood’s other books. The emotional development is slower — deliberately so, given the YA framing — and benefits from it. Mallory’s family responsibilities give her choices weight: unlike Olive in The Love Hypothesis, she is not just deciding about herself.

Check & Mate is not as stylistically distinctive as Hazelwood’s adult fiction, but it is her most emotionally grounded novel to date.