Book Review #136: Check & Mate by Ali Hazelwood

After chess destroyed her family four years earlier, Mallory Greenleaf decided to never play again. But when helping out a friend in a charity tournament, she wins against Nolan Sawyer, the current world champion. And suddenly Mallory finds her chess skills in demand - in exchange for desperately needed cash prizes. But can she keep her family separate from the game she vowed never to play again?

I'm a big fan of Ali Hazelwood's books. Even when I'm going through a romance slump, I always know that I'll like whatever she writes. So while I didn't love the plot of this one, I knew that I'd probably still like it.

And that's true for this book. I liked it, but because I didn't love the plot, it definitely wasn't one of my favourites of Hazelwood's.

The book gives us a good first impression of Mallory. We like her instantly which makes her a good protagonist to follow throughout the story.

It took a while to really get into the story. There was a lot of back-and-forth in terms of worldbuilding that didn't feel important for the rest of the story, and I'm not sure it was all needed.

As the book is marketed as a romance, and it is a romance, I wanted the romance to start a lot quicker than it did. It felt like we as the reader are just waiting for the romance, but 100 pages in the characters hadn't spent any time together, which was a bit frustrating.

Because of this and the focus on chess rather than these characters, the book didn't really feel like much of a romance to me. If anything the romance was a secondary story.

I believe this was Hazelwood's first book marketed as young adult rather than adult, and you can definitely tell the difference. The story and the characters feel very YA, and while I do enjoy YA novels, I feel like for Hazelwood specifically I much prefer her adult books.

There are a lot of interesting supporting characters who don't get as much time to shine as they should, which was a bit disappointing because some of these characters are more interesting than the main ones!

Overall, this book was fine. I liked it but not as much as I could have. As already mentioned, I much prefer Hazelwood's adult novels and while I will always be diving into those, I'm not as excited about reading another YA from the author.

3/5