THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT (Walter Tevis) - December 23/21

 Read this for the Spooner book club and I really enjoyed it. Tevis does tend to go overboard in describing the various chess games, and I generally glazed right over them, but he also offers up a really striking, sympathetic protagonist and a number of engaging periphery characters and subplots. (I really enjoyed the fact that Mrs. Wheatley turned out to be extremely supportive, for example.) *** out of ****