Review Detail

5.0 3
Young Adult Fiction 583
Gambits in [Jackson Heights] Queens!
(Updated: December 24, 2021)
Overall rating
 
5.0
Plot
 
N/A
Characters
 
N/A
Writing Style
 
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Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)
 
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Great writing here, wit and warmth and righteous anger, and more than that: sophisticated thinking, social awareness and practical-utopian dreams. Moses Middleton has perhaps not done justice to himself yet in his young life. Perhaps as he enters his freshman year in high school, he feels he hasn't been pushing himself to achieve, he hasn't been giving it his all to realize his potential, he has avoided challenges and chosen the paths of least resistance. When he starts his school chess club, it's another perhaps half assed effort to get something more than mediocre going in his neighborhood and his life. But little does he know, this club and the mission to which it eventually is pledged -- to show up the privileged douchebags of Galton Prep -- is going to take him deeper than he expected into the lives of others, into the politics of his time, into his own capacities and talents, and into the on deck circle of adulthood. And it's great great fun to be along for this ride. Moses' friends are vividly drawn and their friendships are real and evolving before our eyes -- into a one-for-all- and -all-for-one spirit. This would have been my favorite book as a kid, and I'm so happy to be able to give it to the kids I know for the holidays. But their parents are loving it too. A great choice for reading together. Can't wait for the sequel.
Good Points
- Really witty protagonist 1st person narrator
- Plotting that pulls you through the book in one sitting if you have time
- Politics! And people who care about politics.
- The real stakes of real lives in contemporary America, urgently felt
- Vivid, plausible, engaging characters whose trajectories are open, not predestined
- Great sense of place and time: diverse NYC neighborhood undergoing gentrifying invasion
- Social issues handled unsentimentally but hopefully
- Romance!
- High schoolers realistically taking action
- Chess written with excitement!
- Cultural references, from Opera to B movies, you want to follow up


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