The First Move follows Juliet and Ronan who both play online chess and struggle with their own things in their lives that make these chess games their escapes. All the characters in this book, Juliet, Roman, and all of our side characters were really strong characters with well-developed backgrounds and lots going on in their lives.
We also had great representation in this story with some characters having more difficult home lives and Juliet's arthritis that she finds particularly challenging to deal with at school. Something about this I also particularly liked was it wasn't just Juliet and Ronan who had developed characters and backgrounds many of our key side characters did too, not all of them as that would have been far too much information, but the ones we saw frequently and it helped to know well did and that was great to see.
As someone who knows next to nothing about chess the chess talk in this was not too much to understand for me and always felt like I had a grip on what the characters were doing. It also wasn't only chess scenes which I appreciated there were also many other fun and light scenes that were focused on other things that felt more accessible for all readers not just chess players. Recently I have seen a peak in chess and nerdy romance books which I really like to see and am enjoying making my way through as more and more are released.
As you would expect from teenagers not everyone makes brilliant decisions all the time nor are they as good friends as they could be however you can tell how much they care about those people around them even if they could show it better and often they do correct those mistakes which is as much as you can expect. Some of them were people you could not ask to be better friends and friendship is something I love to see in Young Adult and don't want to stop seeing at all.
As someone that gravitates towards Young Adult Contemporary stories less at the moment this reminded me exactly why I love these types of books and think they are so important for the world and so teenagers can see themselves and know that everyone deserves their own love story which I feel like is really shown within this book. I am so glad that the YA book prize has finally pushed me to pick this up after a year of putting it off because I don't know when else I would have gotten to it. Hopefully I will read more Jenny Ireland in the future because this was great.
Thank you to Penguin Random House and Netgalley for a free e-arc in exchange for an honest review.
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