“Sometimes I’m scared that I imagined you. Sometimes I think you’re only in my head.”

Mallory gave up chess after it tore her family apart and has shifted her focus on caring for her ill mother and younger sisters. When she agrees to one last charity tournament, she finds herself going against the current world champion Nolan and inadvertently wins. Nolan is eager for a rematch, but Mallory is adamant that was her last game. After losing her job, which is the majority of her household's income, she can't fight the pull into the competitive chess world any longer, the prize money alone will change her family's lives. She fights to keep her chess career separate from the family it tore apart, all the while fighting the pull she feels toward Nolan and this game she is learning to love again. 

This book was okay most of the time. I liked the chess element, that felt fun and interesting and definitely gave off some "Queen's Gambit" vibes. The characters felt their age, the lack of communication skills, the cluelessness, the awkwardness, the immaturity, all of this felt pretty true to the age range we were experiencing through them. This book had the potential to be great, but it just didn't make it there. My biggest peeve, and yes it bothered me so much that parts of the book were ruined for me, was that this doesn't feel like a YA romance. Sure, it had a fade to black moment, but does that even matter when it is literally talked about in detail throughout the book anyway? This felt like a failed attempt at writing in the YA space and in my opinion, this is one of the few moments where I feel the author should have just aged up the characters and written the scene out the way it seemed like she wanted to and marketed this as an Adult novel.