Check & Mate

From Lab Coats to Chess Boards

Check & Mate is Ali Hazelwood’s first novel aimed at a YA audience, and the shift is instructive. The adult novels — The Love Hypothesis, Love on the Brain — are set in graduate school and research facilities, with protagonists whose primary anxieties are professional. Here, Mallory Greenleaf’s anxiety is more immediate: her father disappeared, her mother has health problems, and her younger siblings need things that require money she doesn’t have.

The chess backdrop is well-chosen. Competitive chess is simultaneously an elite intellectual pursuit and a world of obsessive, eccentric personalities — and it is, crucially, one of the few competitive domains where a young woman can genuinely threaten the world’s best players on pure merit. Mallory’s casual game against Nolan Sawyer — the world’s top-ranked player, two years earlier, at a tournament she attended for reasons that had nothing to do with competition — is the inciting incident: she beats him, is terrified by her own ability, and walks away from chess entirely.

Hazelwood clearly did her research. The psychology of competitive chess — the ways different players approach the game, the particular mental exhaustion of high-level tournament play, the social dynamics of a world that is still processing its recent inclusion of women at the top level — is rendered with real depth. The chess scenes work as both sport and metaphor.

The romance follows a slightly different pattern than the adult novels. Nolan’s interest in Mallory is more openly signalled earlier, which means less of the sustained obliviousness that can exhaust readers of Hazelwood’s other books. The emotional development is slower — deliberately so, given the YA framing — and benefits from it. Mallory’s family responsibilities give her choices weight: unlike Olive in The Love Hypothesis, she is not just deciding about herself.

A Chess World That Rings True

Arriving in the wake of the cultural wave that The Queen’s Gambit set off, Check & Mate could easily have used chess as mere set dressing — but Hazelwood clearly did her homework. The novel captures the texture of competitive play with real fidelity: the specific mental exhaustion of long tournament games, the rivalries and superstitions and eccentric personalities, the rating systems and the relentless travel, and the particular pressure on a woman trying to break into a domain that has historically excluded her from its top ranks. Mallory’s games are rendered as genuine psychological duels rather than vague montages of moving pieces, and the chess functions on two levels at once — as a sport with real tension and as a metaphor for the book’s themes of strategy, sacrifice, and learning to play against someone smarter than you. It is a setting that rewards readers who actually know the game while remaining fully accessible to those who don’t.

Stakes Beyond the Romance

What gives the book its unusual weight for a Hazelwood novel is that Mallory is not free to chase her own happiness. Her family is in genuine financial trouble, her younger siblings depend on her, and the prize money chess offers is not a bonus but a necessity. This grounds her every decision in something heavier than the will-they-won’t-they of the romance: when she risks returning to the game she blames for breaking her family, real consequences ride on it. It is a smart way to raise the stakes of a YA love story without manufacturing melodrama, and it makes Mallory’s eventual self-realization — the discovery that she is allowed to want things for herself, not only to provide for others — genuinely affecting. Unlike the protagonists of Hazelwood’s adult novels, Mallory is deciding about more than her own heart.

A Cinderella Story With a Sharp Edge

At its core, Check & Mate is a knowing modern fairytale: the overlooked girl with a hidden gift, the famous “Kingkiller” champion who notices her, the tournament invitations that whisk her into a glittering world. But Hazelwood complicates the fantasy with a clear-eyed look at the misogyny of elite chess. Through Mallory’s mentor Defne and her own bruising experiences, the novel confronts the reality that a talented young woman is patronized, doubted, and sometimes invited to events precisely because she is a woman — and then dares her to win anyway and silence the doubters. That thread gives the Cinderella structure a feminist backbone, turning a romance into a story about a young woman claiming her own ambition in a world that would rather she stay quiet.

Where It Falls Short

The novel is not without flaws. Nolan, the brooding champion, remains underdrawn for much of the book — more an object of Mallory’s curiosity than a fully realized partner — and readers who want to understand him as well as they understand her may finish wanting more. The romance, while sweeter and less frustrating than the prolonged obliviousness of Hazelwood’s adult novels, can feel basic in its beats, and the ending resolves more quickly and tidily than the careful emotional build seems to promise. Longtime fans may also miss the academic, STEM-workplace flavor that gives books like The Love Hypothesis their particular charm. These are real limitations, even if they do little to spoil the book’s considerable warmth.

Verdict

Check & Mate is not as stylistically distinctive as Hazelwood’s adult fiction, but it is her most emotionally grounded novel to date — a slow-burn YA romance lifted by a genuinely researched chess world and stakes that reach beyond the central couple. Its thin hero and tidy ending keep it from greatness, but for readers who want a swoony, smart, female-centered sports romance with real heart underneath the fairytale, it more than delivers. It is an assured, appealing first step into YA from one of contemporary romance’s most popular voices.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Hazelwood’s most emotionally grounded novel: a slow-burn chess romance with a feminist backbone and family stakes that give the fairytale genuine weight.

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