Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > The Queen's Gambit > Status Update

‘Sometimes, her head reeling, she would feel in the depth of her stomach an anger as intense as the pain of a burst abcess in the jaw - a toothache so potent that nothing but drink could alleviate it. Sometimes the drink had to be forced against a rejection of it by her body, but she did it. She would get it down and wait and the feelings would subside a bit. It was like turning down the volume.’

‘“But it’s mostly about my being a girl."
"Well, you are one."
"It shouldn’t be that important," Beth said. "They didn’t print half the things I told them. They didn’t tell about Mr. Shaibel. They didn’t say anything about how I play the Sicilian."
"But, Beth," Mrs. Wheatley said, "it makes you a celebrity!"
Beth looked at her thoughtfully, "For being a girl, mostly," she said.’

‘It made her sad in a way when she eventually saw how to beat him. It was after the nineteenth move, and she felt herself resisting it as it opened up in her mind, hating to let go of the pleasant ballet they had danced together. But there it was: four moves and he would have to lose a rook or worse.’

‘Somehow she sensed that what she had been caught doing was or a magnitude beyond usual punishment. And, deeper than that, she was aware of the complicity of the orphanage that had fed her and all the others on pills that would make them less restless, easier to deal with.’