Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel, The Queen’s Gambit, is a bildungsroman that examines the life of fictional female chess prodigy Beth Harmon. The novel also tackles issues of feminism and drug addiction. It was adapted into a Netflix miniseries of the same name in 2020. Its epigraph is from the famous poem by W. B. Yeats, “Genius is not a man’s business.” The novel explores the inner workings of genius in a woman. Tevis discussed this theme in an interview in 1983.
While the plot of The Queen’s Gambit is not too heavy-handed, it is full of scenes of substance abuse and death. Teens who are struggling with addiction may find the book hard to get through. It also contains scenes of children being given tranquilizers and a car accident. Adults will likely enjoy the story more than teenagers.
The story is an entertaining one. The heroine, Elizabeth Harmon, is an orphan who escapes an orphanage by playing chess and taking green pills. She eventually rises to the top of the US chess rankings. But the desire to self-destruct never leaves her.
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