The Queen's Gambit: Book Club Pick

The first rule of our book club is that you don't have to read the book to come to meetings. Our book club is more about the people than the pages. But, if you do read the book, you should certainly endeavor to read the right book. 

And I failed, by picking up Queen's Gambit by Elizabeth Freemantle, instead of the Walter Tevis novel. My first thought was "this is awful! when do they start playing chess?!" 

In my defense, I was on painkillers for a back injury at the time, and had the good sense to find the proper title before I got too deep into what is apparently a very popular book about the women who survived Henry VIII. 

< whoops

The Queen's Gambit

I don't have Netflix (and I don't even use a friend's password, not that I haven't been offered, wink, wink) and I really like books with pages, so I got to enjoy Walter Tevis's writing in my head. 

The author of The Hustler and The Color of Money was an English Lit professor at Ohio University before he died in 1984. So, he didn't get to find out just how much the world would love his story about a little girl who rocked the world of chess. 

And clearly, it spoke to folks. Chess sets flew off shelves during the pandemic. (Hopefully assorted combinations of Librium and cheap burgundy didn't become quite as popular.)

Spoiler Alert and Book Club Questions 

For what it's worth, The Queen's Gambit is fiction through and through, but as a good writer, Tevis was a stickler for accuracy in the (lengthy, well-paced) chess sequences - even though he was not a chess player.  (Pool was his game.)

For the record, girls can play chess. Vera Menchik, born in the USSR, moved to the UK and became the first women's World Champion in 1927. Coincidence? Maybe. Tevis's heroine was born in the USA. 

More Trivial Pursuit: 

• Although much of the story takes place in Kentucky, no sequences in the Netflix series were filmed in the state. Most scenes from the TV series were filmed in Germany.
• Mt. Sterling, KY, is a real town near Lexington and Hope Hill Youth Services, an organization that facilitates foster-to-adoption placements, has a facility there. Coincidence? Probably not. 
• Benny's character was probably based on Bobby Fischer. 

Speaking of Benny, was he a love interest, or just crazy about chess? Brief sex scenes aside, I couldn't make up my mind. 

And while I thoroughly enjoyed the book, I didn't see a lot of change from most of the characters. Jolene was a tough chick when we met her; I had no doubt she was going places. Mrs. Wheatley didn't seem to change - sadly, I hoped she'd grown a spine when her husband left, and she didn't really. On the other hand, she didn't completely fall apart, so there's that. And Mr. Wheatley didn't change either, other than becoming a bigger jerk. 

Mr. Shaibel -- gosh, I liked him. 

Of course I didn't like the ending -  almost never do - but I wonder, was the Netflix conclusion more satisfying? 

Next Up and Etc.

Our next club pick is Maybe I Should Talk to Someone. 

On a recent short vacation, I read Hope Never Dies. It was campy, campy, campy! Is there a word that means over-the-top campy? Because that's the word I should use. Also, I enjoyed the posthumously-published Michael Creighton title Dinosaur Teeth. Like The Queen's Gambit, it was fiction, but with a smattering of accurate, truthy details that kept me thinking, did this really happen?

~~~Til next time, reading friends ~~