Milo Bloom, chess prodigy, doesn’t want to play chess anymore. If only he had the courage to tell someone. Instead, he blows a major chess tournament on purpose. If no one knows he wants to quit, no one can be disappointed in him.
The problem is, winning that tournament was a ticket to chess camp, and the loss means his summer plans are shot. Enter Roxie, a girl he’s never met, who shows up at his door uninvited to tell him all about how he and his mom will be spending the whole summer with her and her mom in the “cat room” in their New Jersey home.
Before Milo knows what’s hit him, he’s living at Roxie’s house, where creepy cats rule, meat products are banned, and Roxie, who doesn’t seem to understand the concept of personal space, won’t give him a second alone.
But when Milo and Roxie stumble across two people playing a fascinating game they’ve never seen before, they become determined to learn the ancient game of Go. Between late-night library adventures and creating a Go club at their summer camp, Milo and Roxie form an unexpected friendship, realizing they have a lot more to learn from each other than just the game of Go. That is, if Milo can face his fears and tell his mom how he really feels about chess, so he can stop living a lie.
Milo is frustrated that he has lost the passion he once had for chess. He doesn’t know how to tell his mom that he doesn’t want to play chess anymore. But he can’t tell his mom that for fear of disappointing her. Most kids will relate to feeling like they have to do something they don’t like to make their parents happy, and are too scared to disappoint them if they tell them the truth.
Roxie is quite the quirky character. It’s never said out loud that she’s on the autism spectrum, but her difficulty picking up on social cues implies it. Until Milo, she’s brutally honest and asks many straightforward questions. Roxie tries to learn from Milo those ‘social rules’ that everyone else seems to know. For example, when somebody tells you something you don’t really understand, but you don’t want them to bother explaining it, because it doesn’t matter all that much, and you want to be nice, you just say, “Cool.” This is one of many social interactions where you lie to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. We should all be more like Roxie and be more honest and straightforward with others. It would save so much time.
My favorite thing about this story was the funny dialogue between Milo and his Grandma Ruth (Gruth). One of my favorite moments was when Gruth used the phrase ‘plant a tree’ as a term for going to the bathroom. I’m using this one from now on. Another of my favorites was when Gruth used the phrase ‘kill two cockroaches with one shoe (Gruth doesn’t get why people say something “kills two birds with one stone,” because who wants to kill birds, and she has a point.)
Milo’s enthusiasm reignites when he starts to learn about the ancient game of Go. Even though the rules of how to play Go went over my head, I enjoyed how excited Milo and Roxie got about it.