Rating!

📖📖📖📖/📖📖📖📖📖

My summary of the book:

All the Ways to Go really showed me that you need to be open to your family. You shouldn’t keep secrets or hidden problems to yourself; the hidden secrets will just hurt you more. Milo, the chess prodigy, is where I got the idea of being open to your family. He doesn’t want to play chess anymore. Even so, he just can’t tell his mom. He learned how to play chess when he was 4, and ever since, he was signed up for tournaments whenever there was a chance. After purposely losing a game, things just get worse… or do they? Signed up for a preschool camp, Milo and his weird friend find out about Go, an old game dating back through the centuries. As Milo becomes more and more obsessed, he comes closer and closer to having to explain everything to his mom. She’s going to be furious… or is she? This beautifully written book is so detailed and wonderful, I felt extremely connected to the story.

The summary from the back of the book

Everything felt wrong. I felt wrong. Whoever was sitting the chair, it wasn’t me, at least not the me I’d always been. I didn’t know who it was exactly, but it definitely was not Milo-the-chess-champion me.

In the zone, I was playing myself even when somebody else was on the other side moving the pieces. But something had happened, and now I couldn’t find my way back there.

Quotes from the book

“What can I say? It just happened. I was sitting there like always, like I had in all the first rounds of all the chess tournaments I’ve played since I was four, and everything looked the same. Not exactly, because I’d never played in the Javits center before, and the ceilings were so high, you could fly a drone through there, but everything else was basically the same.”

*************************

“It’s more fun than chess,” Athena said.
“And more complicated,” Dell said. “More challenging.”
“Not only was this guy kind of a jerk; he was also full of it. Chess and I might be having issues, but one thing that hadn’t changed — one thing that will never change — chess was the most complicated, most challenging game in the world. Everybody knew that. “Wait, did you make this game up?”
Athena giggled. “This is the oldest game in the world.
“Oh, come on!” I laughed. “How stupid do we look?”
“I hate that expression,” Athena said. “Intelligence isn’t a physical characteristic.”

*************************

“”C’mon” I say, threading my arm through hers. And we’re off, not to win or lose, just to play.”