Two factors really made me fall for this book. The first is the well-managed symmetry of the plot. While Irina and Alexander have plenty in common – they both face "lost causes" and look for answers to life's problems in the logic of chess – DuBois doesn't let the book's structure and lofty extended metaphors overshadow the individuality and the specificity of her two main characters’ stories. In the book’s parallel plots, two distinct lives are carefully drawn – but not forced – together.

The second is the force of Irina's personality. I'm used to finding late-twenty-something/early-thirty-something female narrators bland, bleak, weak or stifled in some other vital way. Although Irina's emotional life is crippled by her knowledge that she has fatal degenerative disease, there is an unusual vibrancy to her. It’s a quiet kind of defiance, a grim humor, and a very ordinary kind of courage. She's (self-admittedly) self-absorbed and self-pitying, but also keenly self-aware and self-deprecating. Irina’s relationship with herself is messy in a way that feels refreshingly lifelike.

I was reading this book very quickly, but then about 50 pages before the end of this book, I put it down for a few days. It took me almost a week to realize that I had stopped short of finishing it because I was worried it would end in an unsatisfying way. I can’t remember the last time I felt that way about a book. The ending -- well, there's room to argue that DuBois lets both Irina and Alexander off too easy, but there was something elegant about it too.