Book Review | May the Best Player Win, by Kyla Zhao | Chess Chats #10
#chesschats #bookreview #fiction
TL;DR:
This lovely short novel is easy to enjoy and easy to read for chess players young and old. Chess ideas and descriptions are sprinkled like delightful crumbs in the narrative (“I recognised that reference!”), and yet the story remains accessible to readers who aren’t players. Zhao weaves into the narrative serious themes of the impact on young people from cultural norms, and internalising behaviours and thoughts, in the context of performance, gender, and expectations. This is an easy book to recommend. I give it a solid 7 ½ out of 10! 🤩👍
Introduction
There are few novels where chess is a central topic. What I mean is where the character in the narrative is not simply someone who plays chess in a scene, for instance, Ron Weasley in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. No, I’m talking about a book where the story of the protagonist is fundamentally structured around their relationship with chess. Chess is not just a game, but a human and social endeavour, and one that is worth writing and reading about!
The best-known chess novel is undoubtedly The Queen’s Gambit by American author Walter Tevis, and first published in 1983. The 2020 Netflix adaptation was a smash hit and brought many people (back) to chess, including me.
This week (on Tuesday 17th September 2024), May the Best Player Win, a novel by US-based Singaporean author Kyla Zhao will be released. This is Zhao’s third novel, and the first written for younger readers. The book is a story, that follows for a few months, the life of twelve-year-old May Li, a Chinese American middle-school student and chess prodigy, just as she earns success and recognition of her chess prowess. I happily received an electronic advanced copy of the novel last week to read, and to review for the release. The brief synopsis on Amazon:
The clock is ticking for May Li, whose middle-school chess team just earned a victory at the state championship—and with it, a ticket to nationals. What’s even more exciting is that May got an award for being the top female player and a splashy feature in the biggest chess magazine in the country.
May should be thrilled. But some of her teammates, including her supposed-to-be-friend Ralph, aren’t too pleased with the attention she’s getting—and they’re even questioning her skills. Backed into a corner, but not one to back down, May makes a move as bold as any of her chess tactics: She bets Ralph she can win the school’s internal tournament and be chosen as team captain for nationals.
The crown is May’s for the taking . . . except she’s starting to crumble under the weight of everyone’s expectations. Anxious feelings begin to affect her performance and, what’s worse, eat away at her love for the game. Now May is left to wonder: Can you still play for fun when you’re playing to win?
An Opening
Last week (Tuesday 10th September 2024), I spoke to the author on a Zoom call for around thirty minutes, to pick her brains about the book, including the history of how it came to be and her motivations for writing. Biographic information about Ms Zhao can be found on her website, but in brief, she herself in earlier days had been selected for the national junior squad in Singapore. The fictional experiences of our protagonist, the plucky twelve-year-old May, reflects some of the author’s owns lived experiences. Nonetheless, May’s character and adventures are her own, even if they were inspired by the author’s imagination and exploration of possible alternate pasts. At the end of the novel, the author included an interesting message to the reader which allows for perhaps a deeper and more complex interpretation of the narrative. Zhao writes, “Writing this book has felt like an apology but also a love letter to my younger self.”
The reason I note this before my own thoughts about the book is that I undertook the interview and discussion with Zhao about her novel, which covered many of the topics in the message to the reader, before I read it. This might have given me a slightly different experience than that of the typical reader.
* * *
The story begins with May playing her match in the final round of the California Middle School State Chess Championship. The opening establishes the theme of the narrative – that a win is not equivalent to success, and the corollary, that a loss isn’t necessarily failure. However, the narrative is first person; we see the world through May’s eyes, interpreted through her pre-teen mind. As such, the tone of the story is of youthful exuberance, uncertainty, and contradictions. Even in the first dozen pages of the first chapter, we experience through May her emotional highs and lows, her brashness, and painful insecurities.
The story is set in the present-day United States as seen by little details of exposition in May’s world – shopping for groceries at Trader Joe’s, May’s fondness for Chessmen cookies, and that Ding Liren is the world chess champion. Nonetheless, the themes, characters, and their narrative arcs are mostly universal. May and her family are unashamedly Chinese American, and it was somewhat refreshing (to read as an ethnic-Chinese person) that this intrinsic aspect to their characterisation was neither ignored, nor overemphasised to the point of caricature.
I don’t want to spoil the story with too many details, so I’ll be brief. In the days and weeks after the chess tournament, May struggles with her newfound fame and notoriety in terms of her relationships with her friends and peers, her relationship with chess, and fundamentally, her relationship with herself. The story is contained to a period of a few months, and almost entirely within the sphere of her school and club life. As a book for young readers, this is mostly a straight-line story which takes on a slice-of-life type quality. This was probably the aspect of the narrative that I enjoyed the most – cheering with May as she declared a challenge against a clubmate who was acting like an ass, and vicariously feeling the agony and despair as May ruminated on thoughts of inferiority.
Over the twenty-one chapters the story follows a “hero’s journey”. We see May overcome her ordeal through growth in her character, and maturing in her conceptualisation of winning and what it means to succeed. I described the theme from the opening chapter, “that a win is not equivalent to success, and the corollary, that a loss isn’t necessarily failure”. The story ends with a comfortable resolution of the earlier uncertain tone with May “returning home” triumphant.
The Middlegame…
In May the Best Player Win, Zhao raises several serious interconnected themes that are especially salient to chess, but arguably have broader relevance generally.
The first theme that is treated with the greatest depth is sexism – how this is experienced, and the impact that this has on girls and young women in chess. This is clearly an important topic in chess and worthy of exploration. In the narrative, May is devastated by the thoughtless casual sexism expressed by peers, and one of the events is the catalyst that establishes the conflict and the antagonist of the story. The disquieting realisation for the reader is that the words uttered by the antagonist are not only entirely believable from a same-aged character, but also somewhat banal. One cannot but imagine that the carefully crafted scene in the book is replicated in real life innumerable times a day, and potentially much worse. That said, I’m somewhat in two minds in how well this theme was treated in the book, though I acknowledge it is very difficult to cover in the medium. I discuss this further in Endgame.
The second theme is the impact on young people of what I dub a performance culture – where what is prioritised and valued is “winning”. May asks herself in her developing insight, “But when was the last time I played chess for fun and not because I wanted to prove something to someone?”. My view is that this “serious” theme was probably covered and resolved the best in the book.
A third theme that struck me is the demoralising impact that anxious, hypercritical, and catastrophising thoughts, beliefs, and self-commentary can have on the wellbeing of young people. I say “struck” as it seemed to me that some of May’s negative internal dialogue seemed to go beyond what would be expected if it were simply being used as a dramatic literary device. It might be that this wasn’t the intention of the author and I’m overinterpreting this, as it’s a theme that isn’t particularly addressed in May’s character arc.
* * *
But what about the chess bits?!
It’s important to remember that this is a novel and not a chess manual. With chess being a visual game, it’s not easy to describe a position in a game of chess using only words, especially if the planned readers include the general audience. Nonetheless, Zhao has managed to meaningfully include chess ideas and terms into the narrative that is very pleasing to a chess enthusiast, without it being obtuse to a non-player. Each chapter is named using chess terminology that thematically capture the events of the chapter – very clever! Zhao also brilliantly uses soccer analogies to explain chess concepts, and for this exposition to be coherent to the events and to the characters in the story.
Several of May’s games (or parts of a game) are described in narrative and these are highlights. Zhao captures well the emotional tension, self-talk, doubts, and tactical decision-making of a game, making these sections exciting to read. May’s game against her antagonist in chapters 18 and 19 is excellent reading.
The Endgame?
I enjoyed reading the book very much and I applaud Zhao on her fantastic achievement. It’s not easy to write a book, especially one ostensibly aimed at young readers and children. It’s amazing to get a publishing deal! 🤩
As I sat down to write this review, I came to wonder whether Zhao attempted to cover too much in a work of fiction for children and young adults, of only around 230 pages in length. As noted, the story is written as a straight-line (i.e., no alternate framings) first-person narrative of our charming, and somewhat neurotic, pre-adolescent protagonist. Her slice-of-life dramas are delightful and engaging. The limited development of the other characters in the story, which might normally be a problem, are understandable as an expression of May’s own immature and incomplete conceptualisations of their personalities.
Above, I noted that Zhao bravely tackles sexism in this work, a theme that arguably demands nuance and maturity. And thus, the problem for a story that is written from the first-person perspective of… a child. The first time I think I recognised this was in chapter twelve. Zhao wrote the events in this chapter (and all the relevant sections) with the necessary nuance and maturity, but it felt tonally inconsistent. I was taken out of the suspense of disbelief that it was the May from the preceding eleven chapters who was in the scene. Something similar occurs in several other scenes where May’s mother and May’s “jock” friend seemed to be interlocutory actors demonstrating a concept, or offering wisdom, than necessarily behaving like May’s mum or May’s jock friend. These parts of the story have a parable-like quality, which while fine, were a bit out of place.
Nonetheless, I think most readers, especially chess enthusiasts, will be very satisfied with the book. It is great for both the young and… not so young! This book might be great for parents of middle-school aged children – my son is twelve and on reading the book, I felt the need to better understand his social life and internal world!
To close, in my Zoom discussion with Ms Zhao, I asked her whether she had a pithy message she wanted to relay regarding her book. She stated:
“Hold on to what brings you joy. Hold on to what you're passionate about, regardless of other people’s opinions or expectations.”
May the Best Player Win is available in hardcover, eBook, and audiobook from many book vendors including Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and others. It will be released on Tuesday 17th September 2024.
Don’t miss out on your copy!
