The Queen's Gambit

by Walter Tevis

Something in her life was solved: she knew about the chess pieces and how they moved and captured, and she knew how to make herself feel good in the stomach and in the tense joints of her arms and legs, with the pills the orphanage gave her.

All of the tension was gone, and what Beth felt inside herself was as wonderful as anything she had ever felt in her life.

She glared at him across the board, feeling that if she had had a knife, she could have stabbed him with it. Then

she’s so violent

“The Queen’s Gambit.” She felt better. She had learned something more from him. She decided not to take the offered pawn, to leave the tension on the board. She liked it like that.

She liked the power of the pieces, exerted along files and diagonals. In the middle of the game, when pieces were everywhere, the forces crisscrossing the board thrilled her.

That night, after lights out, she took them all, one by one, and waited. The feeling, when it came, was delicious—a kind of easy sweetness in her belly and a loosening in the tight parts of her body. She kept herself awake as long as she could to enjoy the warmth inside her, the deep chemical happiness.

i…

i should have looked up warnings

She was almost nine years old, and she didn’t need Jolene. It didn’t matter how she felt about it. She didn’t need Jolene.

this is unbearable knowing she went through this so young

His smile made her uncomfortable.

i literally cannot stand most of the characters

“You look around,” Jolene said. “They’ll be some nervous orphans around here the next few days.”

i’m so torn between liking this book and being disgusted

Her mind was luminous, and her soul sang to her in the sweet moves of chess.

She had been training alone for most of her life.

This was not the attack chess she had made her American reputation with; it was chamber-music chess, subtle and intricate.

Laev studied it for a long while and then looked at her in a new way, as though he were seeing her for the first time.

There in morning sunshine was the pawn she was going to advance, the file she was going to force open.