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The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis was given to me as a gift. It is also a Netflix series which I knew nothing about when I received this book. I can honestly say I probably wouldn’t have chosen this book on my own. But I can also honestly say that it’s this book that I will still remember and think about months from now.



Elizabeth (Beth) Harmon became an orphan at age eight. With no relatives, she was sent to Methuen Home, an orphanage in Kentucky. She was alone and scared. The orphanage used little green pills to calm the children and Beth began to depend on those pills a little too much. It was the orphanage’s janitor that introduced Beth to the game of chess. A game she would soon discover she had a talent for.



It would be about five years before Beth was able to leave the orphanage. Now Beth was able to truly study chess and at age thirteen entered her first tournament. This event began both the rise and the fall of Beth Harmon. She was indeed a prodigy. She had a natural intuition for the game. But she also struggled with anxiety. With a feeling of not belonging. A feeling that those little green pills helped to ease. And later, she discovered alcohol did as well.

I can honestly say that this book haunted me. Last night I had to stop around eighty percent because it was late. But found I couldn’t sleep, thinking about Beth and what would happen with the particular situation she was in. I also want to say that some may think of Beth as being weak due to her dependencies. But I think she was unbelievably strong. She was completely alone. She clawed and fought her way up in the chess world. She studied all the players, read books, memorized past matches. She had one goal, to beat the best player of all at the biggest match of all, in Russia.



I pretty much went into this blind. I knew it was about chess and that it had become a television series. I did not expect the impact it would have. It’s obvious that the author did a lot of research regarding chess, chess players, and play strategies. There was a lot of detail of Beth’s chess plays and I did end up skimming a little bit through some of these since I’m not a chess player and I didn’t understand them. I just needed to know the outcome for Beth and what was going to happen next.



During the time’s I needed to set this book down for whatever reason, I thought constantly about Beth. And it’s Beth that I’ll be thinking about months from now. This is one of those books that stays with you. If at some future time I become a Netflix subscriber, I’ll definitely watch the series. But for now, perhaps the book or series will initiate new interest in the game of chess.

For more about this book and so many others, come and visit me at Carol's Crazy Bookish World.